Towards a Cartography of Party-Based Illiberalism

Illiberalism has entered its hype phase, increasingly invoked to describe diverse challenges to democracy. Yet the debate remains fragmented between those viewing it as an ideology—often as elusive as liberalism itself—and those restricting it to the practices of governing actors. Furthermore, existing research focuses on a recurring set of “usual suspects,” primarily far-right parties, overlooking potential diffusion among mainstream actors. This paper advances a parsimonious definition of party-based illiberalism as a combination of negative stances toward (i) minorities, (ii) civic and freedom rights, and (iii) horizontal accountability of power—three pillars of liberal democracy. Using the MARPOR corpus (2008–2024), I extract quasi-sentences referring to these dimensions, apply an original codebook to a subsample, and employ machine learning classification to fine-tune MARPOR categories in line with this conceptualization. The analysis examines whether illiberal dimensions systematically co-occur—forming coherent ideational clusters—or whether parties mobilize them pragmatically. By mapping illiberalism across countries, time, and party families, the paper moves the debate beyond the far right toward a unified ideational–practice framework for understanding illiberalism’s growth in contemporary democracies.