Research Projects

AUTHLIB

Liberal democracy faces not one, but many challenges. Consequently, AUTHLIB carefully and systematically explores the varieties of illiberalism. Illiberalism has diverse ways of appealing to elites and to highly varied citizens, through narratives, programs and policies, emotional appeals, and institutional innovations, and it has developed methods of diffusion, each of which needs to be understood and mapped. In line with the varieties of illiberalism and their diverse diffusion channels the policies to mitigate and combat them need to be appropriate to the nature of the challenge in a given context. AUTHLIB provides a toolkit for policy making to defend and enhance liberal democracy against its political challengers by understanding and explaining the nature of illiberal ideologies, processes and policies. The toolkit - consisting of case-specific sets of tools - will consist of theoretically, normatively, and empirically grounded ways of responding to the specifics of illiberal claims against liberal democracy. To achieve these goals, a thorough comparative understanding of the varieties of illiberalism and a toolkit providing responses to illiberalism to strengthen the resilience of liberal democracy, AUTHLIB addresses two overarching objectives: 1) a map of varieties of illiberalism and citizen responses, and 2) the design and testing of interventions. For more information see here.

Papers in Progress

• ``Deciding in Difficult Democracies: Evidence from Presidential Elections in Eastern Europe" (with Filip Kostelka and Lenka Rovna)

• ``Voter Turnout and Satisfaction with Democracy in the Post-Communist Context" (with Filip Kostelka, Lukas Linek and Michal Škvrňák)

• ``Voters' Latent Preferences and Support for Real Candidates: Insights from Czech Elections" (with Filip Kostelka, Eva Krejčová, Lukas Linek and Michal Škvrňák)

• ``European Integration and the Populist Challenge" (with Jonathan Polk)

• ``The Russian Threat and the Consolidation of the West: How Populism and EU-skepticism Shape Support for Ukraine" (with Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Ryan Bakker, Seth Jolly, Jonathan Polk, Marco Steenbergen and Milada Anna Vachudova)