Discursive Strategies Of Democratic Erosion In Europe

De-democratization, or the illiberal turn, has been unfolding in Europe in recent years. Democratically elected leaders, incrementally and under legal pretenses, have been eroding the core principles of democracy and diminishing the significance of key procedures that safeguard these values. Despite this democratic erosion, voters of government parties remain surprisingly content with democracy, indicating a complex relationship between voter perception and the quality of democracy. This paradox highlights the multidimensionality of democracy and its diverse interpretations, as recognized in theoretical studies and empirical indices. Central to this research is the analysis of democracy frames employed by right-wing populist parties in Europe. Since framing democracy in various ways is a common discursive tool in political party competition, this study analyzes the most prominent frames used by governing right-wing populist parties. We demonstrated that the redefinition of democracy by these parties involves depleting its liberal dimension while significantly reinforcing its majoritarian aspect. The incorporation of nativist claims, catering to the needs of specific social groups who felt politically marginalized, ensured their electoral victories and facilitated the gradual dismantling of democratic procedures and institutions. We also reveal that these narratives were consistently present in European political discourse, resonating with actors dissatisfied with the direction and pace of European integration, economic development, and ethnic tensions. While initially marginalized or suppressed by elite consensus, the decline in security following the 2008 economic crisis and the 2015 European migration crisis enabled right-wing populist parties to revive the concept of majoritarian, exclusivist democracy and garner sufficient electoral support for their agenda. The analysis utilizes data from the ParlaMint database, a comprehensive, structured, multilingual corpus of parliamentary debates, linguistically annotated and enriched with speech metadata (Erjavec et al., 2022), and merged with national-level corpora and major databases detailing the ideological positions of political parties (ParlGov, CMP, POPPA). Employing word embeddings (Mikolov et al., 2013) and their extensions, including party embeddings (Rheault and Cochrane, 2019), we analyze the most prevalent democracy frames in the discourse of right-wing populist parties (Plisiecki and Kwiatkowska, forthcoming). We establish the causality and effects of political frames (Egami et al., 2022), illustrating how new democracy frames were introduced into public discourse by these parties, how their semantic context evolved over time, and evaluating their impact.