Mobilizing the politics of knowledge for the politics of autocratization

Attacks on science and education are becoming more common across Europe. This paper aims to contribute to understanding these attacks on epistemic institutions, on epistemic actors and on the knowledge they produce. What is the importance of these actions for society? Why do aspiring autocrats, their allies and supporters target this domain, how do they do that, and what is the impact on democracy? For its reflections and analysis, the paper links recent research on a more contextual and historical understanding of the quality of democracy in Europe from the CCINDLE project (Roggeband et al. 2025, Korolczuk et all 2024), with recent work on incumbent-led democratic recession (Van Lit 2025, Van Lit and Van Ham 2024). The paper uses the concept of ambiguity to highlight the role of attacks against the episteme domain for increasing autocratization. Linking these works, I start with reiterating the problem of overestimating the quality of democracies in Europe, followed by highlighting how this already shapes the role that epistemic actors and institutions can have for the quality of European democracies, and a critique on the absence of attention for scientific and educational institutions and actors in political science scholarship on autocratization. I then bring together these arguments with empirical insights on the nature of attacks in this domain to clarify how these attacks further damage the quality of democracy and the potential for democratic defense, and advance autocratization.