Speaking Strongman Politics: The Determinants and Diffusion of Illiberal Communication Among World Leaders

The literature acknowledges that illiberal communication is tailored to advance various aims of non-democratic governance. Illiberal actors strategically emphasize economic performance and patriotism in their public speeches (Baturo and Tolstrup, 2024), intimidate their opponents (Carter and Carter, 2023), attract attention to regime achievements, and distract citizens from policy failures (Barberá et al., 2024). That is, what illiberal politicians say is not always cheap talk, revealing insights into the functioning of the political regimes. While recent studies have started to measure illiberal rhetoric (Schafer et al., 2025) and explore the domestic effects of normative, performance, and intimidation messages by leaders in particular countries (Neundorf et al., 2024), we still lack a strong theoretical basis and compelling empirical evidence on the determinants and diffusion of strategic illiberal communication in a comparative context. This is particularly important and policy-relevant given that many illiberal actors learn from each other and address both domestic and foreign audiences, and we need to understand how to counter such messages. The paper addresses this research gap by accounting for not only what illiberal actors speak about but also how they address their audiences, under what conditions they deploy particular rhetorical strategies and how they adopt rhetorical tools from each other. Building on the new datasets of the public speeches, social media posts, and biographies of the heads of states in 2015-2025, I apply natural language processing and large language models to uncover the specific properties of autocrats’ illiberal messaging compared to their democratic and liberal counterparts, such as normative and policy appeals, complexity, emotiveness and communication style. Then, I measure narrative similarity and directional influence of illiberal actors in their public communication. The preliminary results demonstrate that the global illiberal rhetoric became less complex, more emotional and more similar in appeals over time, converging on a set of strategic frames justifying the confrontation with the Western liberal elites and the need for the multipolar world order. I also find that in addition to Chinese and Russian autocrats, the illiberal trendsetters include the heads of Turkey, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran, in line with studies of authoritarian soft power (Walker, 2016). The findings contribute to the literature on illiberalism, legitimation, authoritarian diffusion and learning.