May 14, 2019
PhD alumna Seraphine Maerz and professor Carsten Schneider's co-authored article "Comparing public communication in democracies and autocracies: automated text analyses of speeches by heads of government" scales the (il)liberalism of public discourses including 4740 speeches delivered between 1999 and 2019 from 40 political leaders of 27 countries:
"All tests suggest that our liberalness scale does capture meaningful differences between political regimes despite the large heterogeneity of our data."
And more is in the making on the topic of illiberal discourse and its corrosive effect on democracy.
Full text available: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11135-019-00885-7