The results indicate that illiberalism has been present in far-right discourse since 1999, but large fluctuations existed until the late 2000s. After 2009, a stable trend evolved, with a marked increase since 2017 and the three dimensions trending together.

The article is openly available.

Empirically, we perform a quantitative content analysis on parliamentary speeches by far-right parties and develop an illiberalism dictionary for the context of the European Parliament. Based on this dictionary, we identify illiberal speeches and report annual percentual shares.

We build on conceptualizations of illiberalism as a set of ideas with a political, a socio-cultural and an economic dimension and argue that illiberalism is a useful perspective to understand how nativism, authoritarianism and populism are integrated into an overarching illiberal agenda.