Panel: LLMs for political analysis
How does normalized illiberal discourse relate to democratic decline? A growing literature shows that populist, illiberal, and radical rhetoric can move from the political fringes into the mainstream of democratic politics through processes of repetition, diffusion, and accommodation. Yet the institutional consequences of this normalization remain poorly understood: in some democracies, normalized illiberal discourse and institutional erosion appear to reinforce one another, while in others, democratic institutions prove resilient. This paper examines the conditions under which normalized illiberal discourse and democratic decline co-evolve as mutually reinforcing trajectories, and the conditions under which democracies contain such dynamics. Using fine-tuned transformer and large language models (LLMs), we analyse a large cross-country corpus of several hundred thousand speeches by heads of government, cabinet members, party leaders, and parliamentarians to measure the prevalence and trajectory of normalized illiberal discourse across democracies with varied institutional outcomes. We then relate these discursive measures to institutional indicators of democratic quality to identify the political, institutional, and party-system conditions that mediate the discourse–decline relationship. The findings contribute to understanding democratic vulnerability and resilience, while
offering methodological innovations for measuring public discourse comparatively and at scale.
