The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in the so-called Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
This project has been funded via the EUI Early Stage Researchers (ESR) call 2024 with the contribution of the Widening Europe Programme.
Of the many challenges to the liberal international order, populism remains among the most persistent and pernicious. From isolated cases in the early 21st century, populist movements and parties have become a global phenomenon bringing with them an illiberal shift in public policy. As such movements have become more institutionalised and embedded, they have also begun to establish think-tanks, conferences, Europarties, and other transnational links.
The proliferation of such institutions, and their institutionalisation, has resulted in calls for scholars to move beyond the backsliding paradigm and take at face value the challenges posed by these new ideological groups and organisations. However, the international dimension of such groups, and their impact on the diffusion of populist ideology and illiberal policy, remains understudied, with most research focusing on case specific discourse, policies, or electoral strategies.
This project aims to rectify this by investigating how such organisations affect the international diffusion of populist political frames and illiberal public policy across Central and Eastern Europe. The research will focus on radical right-wing populist (RRP) parties and their associated institutions, groups, and think-tanks. While each party, of course, combines its own mixture of ideas in its discourse there has been a rising trend of international solidarity amongst these groups and notable incidences of shared presence at policy events.