When Democracy Divides: Party Polarization Over Liberal Democratic Principles

While democracy continues to be supported in the abstract, its specific liberal components are increasingly contested across Europe. Yet, we lack a clear understanding of how parties are polarized over democracy and its consequences for voters. This study introduces a novel, fine-grained approach to measuring party stances on liberal democracy. Using a corpus of parliamentary speeches from 1990 to 2024, I train a large language model to identify opposition to liberal democratic principles. I then examine how polarization along this dimension shapes citizens’ evaluations of democracy. The analysis reveals substantial variation and dispersion in party positions across countries and over time, suggesting that liberal democracy has become a key dimension of party polarization. This conflict, in turn, affects voters: as parties polarize on the liberal democratic dimension, voters’ democratic satisfaction declines. These findings have important implications for our understanding of party competition, the structure of ideological conflict, and democratic functioning in Europe.