Explaining varieties of illiberalism among far-right parties in Europe

What characteristics explain heterogeneity in illiberal discourse among far-right parties in the European Parliament? While an extensive literature deals with the challenges that both liberalism and democracy are facing across the globe, especially posed by parties on the far-right and radicalized conservative actors, limited attention has been paid to the factors that explain variance in illiberal ideology within the party family and differences that might exist in this regard. This is further exacerbated by a tendency to focus on far-right commonalities when analyzing those parties on the transnational level, such as on the formation of discourse alliances on specific topics, or their voting behavior in legislative processes, while far-right heterogeneity, especially regarding illiberalism, remains understudied. We address this issue in our article by analyzing discourse on the European level, building on a comprehensive dataset comprising of all speeches given by far-right parties between 1999 and 2023 in the European Parliament. In a first step, a quantitative content analysis approach is employed to discern degrees of illiberalism within that discourse. Subsequently, the resulting scores are subjected to regression analysis, considering diverse explanatory factors that are theoretically identified to influence a party’s inclination towards illiberalism, such as regional legacies, individual party traits or contagion effects within European parliamentary groups or party families. Our article not only contributes to the comparison and exploration of heterogeneity within the transnational far-right, but also deals with the growing ideational challenge to the liberal-democratic consensus.