Keywords

There is little doubt that the era of triumphant liberalism is over. The much-debated seismic events of 2016—the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and Trump’s victory in the US presidential election—exposed the fragility of liberal democracy even in its historic strongholds. Parallel events in other parts of Western Europe, from the Yellow Vests protest movement in France to the ascent of far-right parties such as the Alternative for Germany, the Freedom Party of Austria, or Lega Nord and the Brothers of Italy, confirmed that the decline of liberal democracy is threatening to become endemic. These developments led several scholars to raise serious concerns about the state of liberal democracy, mapping its gradual deterioration and even foreseeing the possibility of its complete fall (Applebaum, 2020; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018; Moghaddam, 2019; Mounk, 2018; Przeworski, 2019; Runciman, 2018; Snyder, 2018).

The COVID-19 pandemic has given a new impetus to these fears, fuelled by the attempts of several governments to use the pandemic as a pretext for restrictions on civic freedoms and curtailing of democratic rights. According to monitoring carried out by the V-Dem Institute, the majority of countries around the world displayed some form of violation of democratic standards between March and December 2020 (Edgell et al., 2021). And just as the world bid farewell to the ‘annus horribilis’ of 2020 and welcomed the new year with an optimistic prospect of mass vaccination, it was shocked by the events in Washington on 6 January 2021, which saw an armed insurrection against the government of the world’s first modern-day democracy, broadcast live on television and incited by its outgoing president who refused to accept his electoral defeat. The images of the violent mob storming the Capitol and jeopardizing the safety of the parliamentarians, in what President Joe Biden later called ‘the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War’ (Biden, 2021, April 28), were perceived as emblematic of the vulnerability of not just the US political system but of contemporary democratic societies in general.

It is not just the long-established democracies that are in turmoil. Several countries with comparatively weaker democratic traditions have recently seen a rise of right-wing nationalist strongmen who have claimed the top seat in the political hierarchy. Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Narendra Modi in India have all taken their countries down the authoritarian path, demonstrating that illiberalism is indeed a global phenomenon (Vormann & Weinman, 2020). In Eastern Europe,Footnote 1 the gradual decoupling of electoral democracy and constitutional liberalism, a trend encapsulated in Fareed Zakaria’s (1997) term ‘illiberal democracy’, has been particularly palpable, with several countries in the region joining Hungary in an apparent turn away from the ideals of liberal democracy as a system of governance to aspire to and preserve. Even though most recent elections in parts of the region seem to have pushed the pendulum back in the other direction, attacks on liberal values and attempts to politicize key democratic institutions remain an integral part of public life in the region. The ongoing war in Ukraine, prompted by Russia’s invasion in 2022, further highlighted the vulnerability of democracy in the region, compounding internal political contestations over liberalism by an external threat. Scholarship analysing the current woes of democracy and mapping the global turn to illiberalism is growing quickly. However, for the most part, it focuses on political institutions, actors, and policies, while paying little attention to the broader cultural, social, and technological environment underpinning the political system. In particular, the communication perspective is largely missing—a rather curious omission given the crucial role played by the media in sustaining liberal democracy, as well as in enabling political actors seeking to undermine it. From the problematic practices of political advertising and foreign propaganda enabled by digital platforms, exemplified in the Cambridge Analytical scandal and the role of Russian Internet trolls during the 2016 US presidential election, to attempts of populist leaders in Eastern Europe to monopolize public service broadcasting, there is ample evidence of the crucial role played by communication technologies in advancing the ‘illiberal turn’. Clearly, understanding the involvement of media and communications in fostering the decline of the liberal order is a key prerequisite for appreciating the nature of challenges faced by contemporary democratic societies.

Addressing this gap is not a straightforward task. Much of recent communication and media research is already examining the link between the changing information environment and recent political developments contributing to the illiberal turn, including the rise of populist leaders and far-right movements. Yet, this research typically shies away from broader theoretical reflections on how these shifts might be changing the institutional underpinnings and normative foundations of public communication. We argue that this is in part a result of the overreliance on the concept of populism, which—while very useful for the field—is increasingly used in an indiscriminate way that conflates disparate ideological and political trends. If we want to fully understand the contemporary challenges to liberal democracy and the role of media in these challenges, we therefore need to move beyond the conceptual framework of populism. Specifically, we need an additional set of conceptual tools that can help us examine what happens to public communication after populism becomes a widespread feature of political life, especially in the aftermath of the successful mobilization of populist strategies by far-right or ultra-conservative political actors in their rise to positions of power.

To help develop such a set of tools and advance the debate on the role of communication in contemporary challenges to democracy, this book builds on emerging debates on illiberalism and introduces the concept of the illiberal public sphere, defined as a communicative space comprising both traditional and new media that promote and amplify illiberal actors, views, and attitudes. Traditionally, the public sphere has been treated as an inherently liberal project, following Jürgen Habermas’ (1989) analysis of the historical development of the bourgeois public sphere in Western Europe. Yet, several scholars have pointed out that the public sphere—either as a normative ideal or as an empirical reality—is far from unitary and is not wedded to a single space, set of values, or political ideology. The polymorphous character of the concept is reflected in the different adjectives attached to it over the years, such as ‘proletarian public sphere’ (Negt and Kluge 1993), ‘transnational public sphere’ (Fraser, 2014), ‘authoritarian public sphere’ (Dukalskis, 2017), ‘empathetic public sphere’ (Korstenbroek, 2022), or simply ‘alternative public sphere’, as a broad label adopted by many authors to designate the type of public sphere that exists in parallel with (and often in opposition to) the dominant one.

In this book we argue that much as democracy does not necessarily go hand in hand with liberalism, a public sphere can coexist with an illiberal political order and indeed plays an instrumental role in its establishment and consolidation. To put it differently, the declining popularity of liberal democracy and the growing appeal of nativist populism and authoritarian governance are occurring in conjunction with the rise of an illiberal public sphere. The government often plays a central role within this sphere, for example by capturing public service media or by adopting illiberal media and cultural policies, but it is far from the only actor. Right-wing populist and ethno-nationalist politicians, parties and social movements, corporate and religious figures and organizations, news media (often controlled by oligarchs or government’s cronies) pursuing illiberal agendas or disinformation, conspiracy news websites, social media channels, and other ‘alternative’ outlets spreading illiberal narratives are all key building blocks of the illiberal public sphere. We argue that the illiberal public sphere gradually colonizes the institutions that have previously served as a cornerstone of the liberal public sphere, including independent news organizations and public service broadcasters, contributing to the polarization and radicalization of political discourse, as well as to the proliferation of illiberal attitudes among citizens. It is however important to note that the illiberal public sphere operates within the framework of a political system that is not (yet) fully authoritarian, as it allows for pluralistic political competition and the existence of basic democratic rights and freedoms, even if those might be in the process of being curbed by the government.

This book further develops and provides empirical support for these arguments by utilizing a combination of original and secondary data collected over the course of several years in a region that acts as a key battleground of illiberalism and constitutes a particularly apposite site for research on this topic: Eastern Europe. We focus on four countries that are characterized by a shared history of communist rule and democratic transition but have been affected by the rise of illiberalism in different ways and hence constitute a good basis for comparison: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Serbia. Combining population surveys with an extensive set of media diaries and qualitative interviews, we examine how public attitudes—both liberal and illiberal—are informed by news media diets and how they interact with the changing communication ecosystem, increasing political polarization and illiberalism in these four countries. We pay particular attention to the role of the Internet and social media, which have become important instruments not just for political communication but also for political participation in these countries over the past decade.

Throughout the book, we seek to situate these regional developments in a global context and close with a reflection on how the theoretical and analytical framework developed in the book—anchored in the concept of the illiberal public sphere—can help elucidate the interaction between communication and illiberalism globally. In the rest of this introductory chapter, we first review some of the key causes of the decline of liberal democracy and situate them vis-à-vis developments in the sphere of communication. We then proceed with a brief discussion of Eastern Europe as a battleground of illiberalism and, finally, outline of the chapters that follow.

1.1 Democracy in Retreat: Populism, Polarization, and the New Communication Environment as Vehicles of Illiberalism

Scholarly debates and concerns about the crisis of liberal democracy are certainly nothing new. Theorists of democracy have long pointed out that there is an inherent tension within the concept of liberal democracy, which is torn between the key principle of democracy—the popular rule, i.e. the majority rule—and the protection of individual rights and liberties, which is the cornerstone of liberalism (Salkever, 1987). Critical scholars inspired by Marxism, particularly those associated with the Frankfurt School, repeatedly highlighted a fundamental incompatibility between capitalism and its pursuit of an unrestrained free market economy that promotes inequality and a political system that derives its legitimacy from the notion of equality of votes and rights of citizens (e.g. Habermas, 1996).

And yet, despite ongoing doubts about its legitimacy and viability under the conditions of late capitalism, liberal democracy has demonstrated resilience as well as global appeal, as the world witnessed several countries transition to democracy over the course of the twentieth century, especially as part of the ‘third wave of democratization’ which rolled over parts of Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa between the 1970s and the early 1990s (Huntington, 1993). Even though Francis Fukuyama’s (1989) famous claim about liberal democracy representing the ‘end of history’—that is, ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ (p. 4)—was met with widespread dismissal, the fact remains that ever since the 1990s, the proportion of world’s countries classified as democratic has been higher than those labelled as authoritarian (Diamond, 1997; Desilver, 2019, May 14).

However, the relative success of democracy over the past half a century is now being overshadowed by the gradual decline in its quality and even by a reversal of the democratization process in some parts of the world. All the main organizations that monitor the state of democracy across the globe, including Freedom House, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), and the V-Dem Institute, have recently recorded a notable slump in democratic performance. In 2019, the EIU’s Democracy Index fell to a level that corresponded to ‘the worst average global score since the index was first produced in 2006’.Footnote 2 As a result of the pandemic and government-imposed restrictions on freedoms and liberties, the 2020 average dropped even further, with almost 70% of countries having recorded a decline in their total scores (EIU, 2021). In its 2019 Freedom in the World report, Freedom House pointed to a ‘consistent and ominous’ pattern of decline in global freedom, affecting both established democracies as well as countries ranked ‘not free’, whose share has started to grow again (Freedom House, 2019). These findings are corroborated by the V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2021, which recorded not just a continuous decline of liberal democracy over the past decade, but also an acceleration of ‘autocratization’, i.e. a significant worsening of democracy that now affects 25 countries, compared with less than ten a decade ago (Alizada et al., 2021).

The decline in the quality of democracy as evaluated by experts has been complemented by the rising dissatisfaction with democracy among citizens. According to an analysis by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, drawing on multiple data sets from across three decades, the level of global dissatisfaction with democracy reached its highest level in 2019, with the rise being especially sharp since 2005, the year that the report labelled as ‘the beginning of the so-called “global democratic recession”’ (Foa et al., 2020, p. 2).Footnote 3

How can we explain this turn of the democratization tide? To use Juan Linz’s and Alfred Stepan’s (1996) oft quoted expression: why does an increasing number of people no longer think of democracy as ‘the only game in town’? (p. 15). While the specific explanations certainly vary to some degree from country to country, we can also discern some general trends that are shared across the world. Three trends are of particular relevance to the arguments developed in this book, namely the rise of populism, political polarization, and a changing communication ecosystem marked by the spreading of disinformation. As briefly outlined below, the interaction between these three trends contributed to the creation of a breeding ground for the rise of illiberalism.

Although populism is certainly not a new phenomenon in the history of democratic political systems (Mudde, 2004), electoral support for populist parties has grown over the last decade in Europe and Northern America. Most of these parties have been classified as either radical-right (Taggart & Pirro, 2021) or authoritarian (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). For Norris and Inglehart, it is the combination of populist rhetoric (rallying against the ‘elites’ and thereby corroding faith in the legitimacy of elected representatives) with authoritarian values (emphasizing the importance of security, group conformity and obedience towards leaders) that brings the most significant challenges to liberal democracy. This combination, they argue, has a threefold effect: it fosters tribalism, it promotes the politics of fear, which often involves majorities turning against minorities, and erodes democratic norms and institutions designed to protect individual and civic liberties. As Ivan Krastev (2020) observes, by taking the contemporary political situations in Hungary and Poland as examples, populist parties ‘transform democracy from an instrument of inclusion into one of exclusion, delegitimizing nonmajoritarian institutions by casting them as obstacles to the will of the people’ (p. 160).

However, as noted earlier, the concept of populism has come to be used in such an indiscriminate manner that it obstructs the analysis of contemporary transformations of liberal democracy. Norris and Inglehart’s and Krastev’s arguments outlined above are indicative of the problem but point to different solutions. Norris and Inglehart’s argument rightly implies that populism alone is not damaging to liberal democracy. Rather, it turns into a threat primarily when combined with what they call ‘authoritarian values’. This argument already suggests the need to move beyond the conceptual framework of populism in order to understand the threats faced by liberal democracy. Krastev, on the other hand, implies that populist parties necessarily undermine the foundations of liberal democracy, thereby effectively conflating populism with illiberalism, if not with authoritarian or even fascist tendencies. Such a conflation of populism with illiberalism and other related phenomena has been observed in wider public debates across several parts of the world (Brown & Mondon, 2021; Kitzberger, 2023) and is rather problematic. As we explain in greater detail in Chap. 2, populism and illiberalism do share some important traits—most notably, they are both driven by a disenchantment with political participation and representative democracy—but also differ in significant ways. Most importantly, populism covers a much wider ideological terrain and encompasses discourses, strategies and styles of communication that are not inherently illiberal. As a result, conflating populism with illiberalism can arguably serve to trivialize deeply problematic ideological trends, including the rise of far-right ideologies and actors (Brown & Mondon, 2021).

Even though illiberal political actors—including those we focus on in this book—often use populist discourses and strategies to boost public support and undermine liberal political opponents, simply describing them as populist glosses over some of the key characteristics of their ideological convictions and governance practices, including disdain for cultural liberalism and a tendency to undermine key democratic institutions. To put it differently, when illiberal actors use populist strategies, they do so to spread illiberal attitudes among the general population or to encourage the adoption of illiberal policies. This occurs, for instance, when political leaders use appeals to the people to promote homophobia or hostility towards immigration or to legitimize the curtailing of minority rights or media freedom. However, populist strategies can also be used by political actors who are not illiberal, and who mobilize such strategies in ways consistent with democratic norms and liberal values—as was the case, for instance, with the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders during the 2016 US presidential election campaign (Oliver & Rahn, 2016). Thus, when we say that the rise of populism constitutes one of the key trends that prepared the ground for the rise of illiberalism, what we have in mind is a particular use of populism as a strategy for mobilizing support for illiberal actors and values.

The adoption of populism as a strategy among illiberal actors is typically aimed at exploiting and further deepening political divides. As such, it has been linked to another trend conducive to the rise of illiberalism and observed in many liberal democracies, that is, increasing polarization (McCoy et al., 2018; Mickey et al., 2017; Svolik, 2019). As a process involving a growing division between opposing political camps, paralleled by a shrinking of the political centre and shared political ground (Carothers & O’Donohue, 2019, p. 1), polarization has long been considered a danger to the stability and durability of democratic political systems (Linz & Stepan, 1978; Sani & Sartori, 1983). Although most studies of polarization, and most explicit warnings about its impact on democracy, currently come from the United States, especially following the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 (Mickey et al., 2017; Pierson & Schickler, 2020), studies have documented political polarization in other liberal democratic countries as well, for instance in the United Kingdom (Duffy et al., 2019). Comparative research has suggested a link between increasing political polarization and government-led intimidation of the opposition, thereby supporting the conclusion that polarization leads to democratic erosion (Arbatli & Rosenberg, 2021) and to the rise of illiberalism. Other authors have pointed out that sharp political polarization encourages people to prioritize their partisan interests over democratic principles, an opportunity that is being further exploited by leaders with illiberal or authoritarian inclinations (Svolik, 2019).

Literature on populism, illiberalism, and polarization is increasingly acknowledging the role of media and communication technologies in facilitating and stimulating these processes. The rise of the Internet and digital platforms, and the subsequent establishment of a high-choice media environment (Van Aelst et al., 2017), brought about a plethora of niche, partisan news channels and outlets that have been linked with growing polarization as well as with the electoral success of political actors relying on populist strategies—especially those holding illiberal views. Social media in particular have been blamed for fragmenting the public sphere and for deepening ideological divisions. This argument is commonly linked to the proliferation of algorithm-driven ‘filter bubbles’ (Pariser, 2011) or ‘echo chambers’ (Sunstein, 2017) within which people are selectively exposed to views that conform to their existing political attitudes and beliefs while avoiding information that would challenge them.

Although the empirical evidence of this relationship is not unanimous, digital platforms are persistently seen as one of the biggest villains in contemporary democratic societies. Alongside their impact on polarization, concerns have been voiced about these platforms’ role as channels of misinformation and ‘fake news’, including strategically targeted disinformation campaigns, often linked to Russia, aimed at influencing the electoral process, as well as sowing distrust of democratic institutions. A specific breed of misinformation—conspiracy theories—has found an efficient amplifier in social media, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when such beliefs have demonstrably contributed to an increase in vaccine hesitancy around the world. According to a survey conducted in Eastern Europe in autumn 2020, a third of citizens on average believed that COVID-19 was a hoax and every fourth respondent believed the vaccines contained nano-chips to control the population (Hajdu et al., 2020).

While concerns about the key role that digital platforms play in the crisis of liberal democracy are often well grounded, a focus on these channels alone can arguably distract from the wider transformation of the communication environment that accompanies the rise of illiberalism. Indeed, we argue that the focus on digital media as the vehicles of democratic erosion is in part attributable to the Western-centric focus of existing research, meaning that most studies to date are devoted to established liberal democracies where the rise of illiberalism is typically in its early stages. However, as we demonstrate throughout this book, the relative involvement of different types of media changes as illiberalism gains in strength, with mainstream media increasingly complementing digital platforms as key channels of illiberal values and narratives. This is to an extent evident also in the United States, where some of the legacy of mainstream news media, most notably television, but also radio and newspapers, have come to act as key amplifiers of illiberal attitudes. The continued struggles over public service broadcasting in several European countries, from the United Kingdom and Italy, Hungary and Poland, serve as further confirmation of the malleable nature of the illiberal public sphere and its shifting alignments with different communication technologies, including—but not only—digital media. Indeed, there are grounds to suggest that in countries where the illiberal public sphere is more entrenched, the respective roles of different media platforms and forms of communication shift, with social networking platforms increasingly providing a vital channel of liberal values—an argument that we explore in more detail in Chap. 6.

1.2 Eastern Europe: The Frontline of Illiberalism?

The new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom … but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organization and instead includes a different, special, national, approach. (Orbán, 2014, July 26)

This famous quote from Viktor Orbán’s speech following Fidesz’s victory in the Hungarian parliamentary election in 2014 has become one of the symbols of the dawn of illiberalism not just in Hungary but in Eastern Europe more generally. Ever since Orbán’s rise to power in 2010, this region has been undergoing a continuous process of democratic backsliding, with country after country falling victim to the rise of illiberalism. Freedom House’s annual Nations in Transit report that evaluates the state of democracy in the region stretching from Central Europe to Central Asia, poignantly titled its 2021 edition ‘The Antidemocratic Turn’, signalling the fact that two-thirds of the 29 countries covered by the report suffered a decline in their democracy scores. According to the report, ‘this marked the 17th consecutive year of overall decline in Nations in Transit, leaving the number of countries that are designated as democracies at its lowest point in the history of the report’ (Freedom House, 2021, p. 1).

The pace of the decline has accelerated in recent years, especially following the rapid deterioration of the situation in Hungary during the third government of Viktor Orbán (2014–2018) and in Poland after the presidential and then parliamentary elections in 2015, which brought to power the right-wing populist party Law and Justice, headed by Jarosław Kaczyński. In both countries, the process of democratic deconsolidation followed a similar pattern: capturing the judiciary, transforming public service broadcasters into a mouthpiece of government’s propaganda and launching campaigns against various kinds of ‘social enemies’, particularly refugees, proponents of ‘gender ideology’, and the LGBTQ+ community (Buzogány, 2017; Krekó & Enyedi, 2018; Przybylski, 2018; Sadurski, 2018). In Hungary, the public anti-refugee campaign deployed in response to the 2015 migration crisis has captured the attention of international media, as well as human rights NGOs, who have criticised the Hungarian government for promoting xenophobic stereotypes and stirring hostility towards immigrants (see Chap. 5). In recent years, the Hungarian government has been systematically exploiting other polarizing issues, targeting the EU, ‘liberals’ and, most of all, George Soros, the Hungarian-born US billionaire of Jewish descent who is a known supporter of progressive and liberal causes in Hungary and the wider region. Similar shifts occurred in Poland, with the Law and Justice party fuelling political polarization by focusing its campaigning on the divisive issues of LGBTQ+ rights and abortion. More recently, the 2020 ruling of the Polish Constitutional Court (dominated by government appointees) to restrict access to abortions, sparked widespread demonstrations as well as international condemnation of the infringement of women’s rights (BBC, 2021a, January 28).

These are only some examples of general illiberal tendencies that have been recently observed in these two countries, illustrating governments’ sustained attempts to curb the rights of minorities and to capture those institutions that are designed to protect individuals from the tyranny of the majority. In this sense, Hungary is arguably the closest of all EU member states to what Yasha Mounk (2018) has called a ‘democracy without rights’ (p. 11), i.e. a formally electoral democracy which is however effectively stripped of liberal institutions that protect individual rights and freedoms. However, while Hungary and Poland have arguably been attracting the most attention, the illiberal wave has been eroding democracy in other countries as well. The Czech Republic elected populist leaders in the 2017 parliamentary election and the 2018 presidential election. On both occasions, the newly elected leaders were vocal critics of the media and, in particular, of public service television that has since been fending off repeated attempts at political control (Reuters, 2021, April 9). The former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (one of the main presidential candidates in 2023) has until very recently also been among the leading media owners in the country, in a conflict of interest unseen in the EU since the days of the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Between 2020 and 2022, Slovenia also temporarily joined the illiberal turn when it was led by the right-wing populist Prime Minister Janez Janša, a close friend of Viktor Orbán and vocal supporter of Donald Trump. Often emulating Orbán’s domestic politics as well as Trump’s social media strategy, Janša has been dubbed ‘Marshal Twito’ by its critics, a tongue-in-cheek nickname to mock his affection for Twitter and also point to the authoritarian tendencies in his rhetoric that often targets the media and individual journalists (Higgins, 2021, June 16).

The illiberal turn in Eastern Europe does not stop at the external borders of the EU. Serbia, an EU candidate country that started a ‘delayed transition’ to democracy during the late 1990s, has been experiencing a notable worsening of the quality of democracy and media freedom under the populist right-wing government and subsequent presidency of Aleksandar Vučić (2017–), with rising attacks on journalists, significant collusion between politicians, private media, and government control of public service broadcasting. At the same time, Serbia’s politics and economy have been under the increasing geopolitical influence of Russia and China, with both powers attempting to sway Serbia from its nominally still pro-European orientation. This influence became particularly tangible during the pandemic when Serbia received substantial medical assistance from China and later decided to prioritize the Chinese vaccine Sinopharm for its population (Associated Press, 2021, April 6). Meanwhile, Hungary bought and distributed a substantial quantity of the Russian vaccine Sputnik in another sign of the deepening rift between Hungary and the EU, as the country used to only purchase and authorize US and EU vaccines (BBC, 2021b, April 21). The fact that this rift was gradually growing into a regional one, and that Eastern Europe was witnessing the formation of an illiberal alliance alongside the former Iron Curtain, was further demonstrated by the joint appearance of the leaders of Hungary, Serbia and Slovenia—Orbán, Vučić and Janša—at a virtual panel called ‘Europe Uncensored’ in July 2020. The panel cautioned against the ‘cultural Marxism’ allegedly championed by the EU and called onto the ‘West’ with the claim that Eastern Europeans do not wish to be lectured on ‘how … to live [their] lives’ (Bayer, 2020, July 8).

The outcomes of some of the most recent elections in the region appear to have stemmed the tide of illiberalism, bringing more liberal players to a position of power in Slovenia (2022), the Czech Republic (2021 and 2023), and Poland (2023). Despite these developments, Eastern Europe finds itself at a crossroads, facing the challenge of what Ivan Krastev (2020) has called an ‘illiberal revolution’ that threatens to radically depart from the path chosen by the region thirty years ago. Arguably, this makes Eastern Europe a particularly suitable case study for an inquiry into the nature of the illiberal public sphere. It is beyond the scope of this book to provide a comprehensive answer to the question of why the illiberal turn took hold so successfully in this part of the world. We leave this task to historians, political scientists, and other scholars better equipped for such an inquiry. Rather, our focus is on the role that media and communication have played in the rise of illiberalism—a crucial factor that has remained marginal in existing scholarship on the demise of liberal democracy.

The comparisons between the four countries, where the power of the illiberal public sphere differs in strength and scope, enable us to infer conclusions about how the interaction between media and illiberalism changes as the illiberal public sphere becomes more entrenched. On the one hand, the Czech Republic offers an example of a society where the illiberal public sphere is in its infancy, with a still relatively strong and trusted public service media sector acting as an anchor of a shared public space capable of resisting the pull of political and ideological extremes. On the other hand, the cases of Hungary and especially Serbia show what happens when the illiberal public sphere prevails and the process of political polarization advances to such a degree that a shared public space virtually disappears.

1.3 Plan of the Book

The second chapter sets out the theoretical framework of the book, centred on the key concept of the illiberal public sphere which provides the conceptual backbone to the analysis presented in the rest of this book. We first outline our understanding of illiberalism and explain what makes illiberalism distinct from related phenomena, such as populism and democratic backsliding. We then build on these initial observations to introduce the concept of the illiberal public sphere and elaborate on the historical relationship between liberalism and the public sphere, as explored by Jürgen Habermas (1989). We also consider existing alternatives to the classic public sphere model, including the ‘authoritarian public sphere’ (Dukalskis, 2017), the ‘contentious public sphere’ (Lei, 2017) and arguments about the nature of public communication under conditions of authoritarian control in communist countries, all of which indicate that a public sphere can exist outside of the scope of liberal democracy. We also identify three ideal-typical stages in the development of the illiberal public sphere. Finally, we conclude with a brief overview that charts the evolution and current stage of the illiberal public sphere in the four countries that are at the forefront of our analysis in the chapters that follow.

Following from the presentation of the broad contours of the illiberal public sphere and its evolution in our four countries, Chap. 3 shifts the focus to media audiences. In the first step, we seek to establish whether, and to what extent, a more advanced illiberal public sphere coincides with an increasingly ideologically and politically polarized media system and selective audiences. Combining data from the population survey with expert evaluation of media brands’ performance across the four countries examined in this book—including both traditional media and leading news websites—we provide empirical evidence of media polarization, measured in relation to the ideological bias and political independence of the most relevant news brands in each country. Our findings indicate that media in Hungary and Serbia are the most polarized, while Czech media are more evenly spread across the ideological and political spectrum, with several important brands positioned around the centre, particularly public service broadcasters. Following from that, we move on to probing people’s political attitudes, utilizing data gathered from a population survey that indicate the respondents’ position on selected, culturally sensitive issues that illiberal actors often exploit in election mobilization, as well as the perceived importance of some of the key institutions of liberal democracy. In the next part, these two data sets are juxtaposed to reveal the patterns of people’s news consumption habits, explored from the perspective of how politically and ideologically open or diverse their ‘news diets’ are. Finally, we analyse whether and how these patterns of news exposure match audience attitudes and electoral preferences.

In Chap. 4, we consider how the patterns of news consumption outlined in the previous chapter relate to media trust. We ask how the levels and nature of media trust change as the illiberal public sphere gains in influence and consider whether high levels of media trust are always desirable, regardless of the nature of the political and media system in question. We start by providing a multi-layered mapping of media trust across the four countries, paying attention not just to the more commonly investigated generalized levels of media trust (i.e. trust in news media as an institution), but also trust in individual news brands. This approach allows us to investigate what happens with trust in individual news brands when generalized media trust declines. Borrowing from Christian Schwarzenegger’s (2020) work on personal epistemologies of media use, we argue that, in a context where generalized media trust declines, people adopt a ‘pragmatic’ approach to media trust, seeking to follow news sources that may not be completely trustworthy, but nonetheless offer a more credible account than others. Second, we examine the relationship between media trust and news consumption and use qualitative data to situate media trust vis-à-vis multiple other determinants that shape news consumption. Here, we seek to engage with previous research that investigated why people consume media they distrust, challenging normative models of citizenship that assume news consumption is driven solely by rational aims such as information-seeking (Swart & Broersma, 2021; Tsfati & Cappella, 2005). Finally, we use mixed methods to examine how citizens establish which media are trustworthy. The patterns we find challenge tacit assumptions that link media trust to universal criteria of trustworthiness, such as independence, impartiality, or objectivity. The results suggest that in a context where the illiberal public sphere assumes a dominant position, the normative foundations of media trust start shifting, ultimately leading citizens to place trust in media not because they offer impartial or accurate coverage of public affairs, but because they provide an account of reality they personally agree with or, in extreme cases, because their account of reality is aligned with the one promoted by those in power.

Chapter 5 zooms in on two polarizing issues—immigration and LGBTQ+ rights—that are central to understanding the rise of illiberalism both in Eastern Europe and globally. We focus on the key actors involved in the process of mainstreaming immigration and LGBTQ+ rights as key polarizing issues in the four countries—primarily illiberal politicians, but also church leaders and other opinion leaders—and on the extent to which this process was either fostered or hindered by the media. In line with arguments developed in Chap. 1, we argue that the role of the media differed depending on how advanced the illiberal public sphere was in a particular country at a given point in time. When the illiberal public sphere is in an incipient stage, alternative and online outlets play a key role in the promotion of anti-immigrant and homophobic views, while independent mainstream media are still able to instil more liberal attitudes—as seen in the Czech Republic. As the strength of the illiberal public sphere increases, illiberal leaders can count on the support of an ever-wider range of mainstream media outlets which have the capacity to promote illiberal views on a large scale, potentially also leading to shifts in public opinion—a situation observed in Poland and, especially, Hungary. At the same time, a well-established illiberal public sphere, which resonates with widespread illiberal attitudes among the citizenry, can also limit the ability of illiberal leaders to steer away from the illiberal agenda. This is evident in Serbia, where elite promotion of LGBTQ+ rights and support of immigration as tools of gaining international recognition have had little impact on public opinion or were even faced with widespread opposition. In such a context, the illiberal public sphere becomes a powerful actor in its own right, capable of sustaining illiberalism independently of elite support.

In Chap. 6, we step away from the holistic examination of news consumption across all news media types to focus on social media, considering both social networking sites and messaging applications. The key question addressed in this chapter concerns the role that social media play in facilitating the proliferation of illiberal attitudes from the margins to the mainstream, as well as their potential to act as channels of liberal resistance once illiberal narratives and values have become part of the mainstream. The tone of both academic and public discourse on the matter has changed considerably in recent years, shifting away from the optimistic perspective that hailed the potential of social media to enhance democracy (Tucker et al., 2018) to ever-louder calls for stricter regulation of digital platforms (Tambini, 2021). However, these debates have mainly centred on established Western democracies, leaving unexamined the role that digital platforms play in societies with comparatively shorter histories of democratic governance, and where an illiberal public sphere has taken hold. Aiming to fill this gap, this chapter opens with a brief overview of the rise in Internet penetration and social media use in Eastern Europe, and their adoption by political actors for electoral communication. Our data indicate that, in countries where the illiberal public sphere is more advanced and incorporates a larger proportion of mainstream news media, social media play a greater role as sources of information, often promoting liberal attitudes and support for democracy. At the same time, we also demonstrate the need to distinguish between different types of digital platforms. For instance, in Serbia, users of social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) tend to display more liberal attitudes, while people accessing news from messaging services (e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram) mainly display non-democratic and illiberal attitudes in three of the examined countries. This suggests that ‘private’ (or closed) platforms are more likely to serve as channels for illiberal narratives than more ‘public’ (or open) platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. The argument about social media platforms having a strong democratic potential in this region is further supported by our data showing that people who use social media to express their opinions and engage with political content online tend to be rather resolutely pro-democratic and liberal in their attitudes. Based on these findings we highlight the key importance of social media for sustaining a liberal public sphere and resisting authoritarian populism in countries experiencing more significant democratic backsliding and argue for the need to reconsider blanket calls for digital platform regulation.

Chapter 7 is devoted to the mapping and analysis of the disinformation ecosystem across our sample. According to multiple reports, Eastern Europe is heavily saturated by political disinformation and conspiracy theories, generated and disseminated by ordinary citizens, political parties, and other domestic actors, as well as by foreign powers—especially Russia (Hajdu et al., 2020). While shared by political actors and public figures across the political spectrum, most disinformation and conspiracy theories circulating in the region are aligned with illiberal agendas and range from anti-Semitic beliefs about the Hungarian-born US philanthropist George Soros to right-wing conspiracies targeting immigrants and LGBTQ+ minorities. In this chapter, we examine the ways in which different stages of the illiberal public sphere are linked with the dissemination and reception of fabricated or manipulated information that promotes misleading narratives. We first explore people’s exposure to misinformation and then map the mis- and disinformation ecosystems across the four countries, identifying specific channels and brands which play a major role in the dissemination of misinformation. Following from that, we examine the prevalence of beliefs that are rooted in some of the most popular conspiracy narratives in the region which serve to mobilize support for illiberal political actors and to stir antagonism against their liberal opponents. After that, we zoom in on a specific—and almost completely overlooked—communication channel which appears to be an important instrument for disinformation campaigns, the so-called ‘chain emails’ that are often shared across networks of family members, friends, and acquaintances, especially among the elderly. We conclude the chapter by considering the implications of media literacy initiatives promoted in the region and beyond.

In Chap. 8, we focus on information consumption and the influence of the illiberal public sphere during the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, we ask whether countries where polarization was more extreme, and where the illiberal public sphere was more firmly established, responded to the COVID-19 crisis differently from those where illiberal tendencies were less evident. Drawing on a unique set of qualitative interviews and diaries collected across the four countries during the first wave of the pandemic, alongside secondary sources, we investigate how the combined effects of the disruption caused by the pandemic and the attempts to abuse the crisis for political gain affected citizens’ engagement with COVID-19 news, their responses to government communication, trust in experts, and vulnerability to misinformation. Our analysis suggests that countries where the illiberal public sphere was more entrenched were at a distinct disadvantage when dealing with the crisis from the start, particularly if governing elites abused the situation to further expand their control over public life. Even though the leaders of all four examined countries initially avoided politicizing the crisis in the manner that Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro did in the United States and Brazil, in countries where the illiberal public sphere was more pervasive (i.e. Hungary and Serbia), the public health emergency was more easily turned into a divisive event, instrumentalized to sow distrust in the government and health professionals, thereby making citizens more vulnerable to misinformation.

The final chapter reflects on the broader implications of our findings. We first discuss what the comparison between the four countries tells us about the key constitutive processes and tipping points in the rise of the illiberal public sphere and then outline some of the most recent developments in Eastern Europe and beyond, asking what they might mean for the prospects of the illiberal public sphere. We conclude by offering some suggestions for journalistic practices and media policies that can help make media systems more resilient and able to deflect and contain the challenges of illiberalism.