Understanding the Illiberal Public Sphere

I skipped the morning session this Saturday at the ICA 2024 conference as I was doing a live interview with Australian breakfast television about the current, ill-defined Parliamentary Inquiry into social media; more on that another time. So, I’m starting with a session on mis- and disinformation which begins with Sabina Mihelj, who has just published an open-access book on The Illiberal Public Sphere. Illiberalism has been on the rise at a global level, eroding liberal democratic systems – but how is this different from the concept of populism?

Especially in Eastern Europe, trends are going well beyond populism: illiberalism serves as a grey zone between democracy and authoritarianism, and communication is critical here; in such backsliding democracies there is an illiberal public sphere whose three stages of development need to be further conceptualised.

Illiberalism is an emergent concept, but can be defined by identifying three constitutive features: it is not a direct antithesis to liberalism, but fundamentally dependent upon as well as opposed to liberal institutions. It appeals to liberal values such as freedom of speech and democratic elections in order to gain power. Illiberalism is not simply an ideology, either, but a set of practices: a society governed by majority rule, underpinned by traditional value systems and heteronormative assumptions. And illiberalism is dynamic, disruptive, and even destructive in nature, leading to a gradual decoupling of democracy from constitutional liberalism.

This has some overlaps with populism, of course, as both have a paradoxical relationship with democracy, but populism’s phenomena are ideologically more disparate – it is a thin ideology that can also be used to reinvigorate democracy, not just to destroy it. Therefore, we should not conflate populism with illiberalism, which has a much more distinct set of aims. Populism is therefore more of a political strategy, which can be adopted by a range of political actors – including illiberal ones.

The illiberal public sphere is then a communicative space comprising conventional as well as new media; it is dependent on the traditional public sphere, but also seeks to replace it by colonising it. This means that we need to move beyond an overfocus on social media in its study, and examine both the systemic and institutional as well as the cultural ones. And of course public sphere here needs to be understood as going well beyond Habermas’s severely limited conceptualisation.

There are three stages of the illiberal public sphere, then: incipient, ascendant, and hegemonic. These can be understood across several parameters: the relative scope of the illiberal and conventional public spheres; key media forms and outlets of the illiterate public sphere; key political and cultural actors in it; media policy and regulation; media ownership and independence; and position of illiberal narratives. As the illiberal public sphere moves through its three stages, then, the positioning of the illiberal public sphere and its constituent components moves from the fringes to the centre, with increasing capture of state and media institutions and a growing role for illiberal narratives within public discourse. In the final stage, the illiberal public sphere has entirely hollowed out and taken over the conventional public sphere, which itself becomes a kind of counter-public sphere relegated to the fringes.

Such changes then also affect citizens media consumption habits, trust in the media, attitudes, misinformation beliefs and crisis communication practices. This has been evident in backsliding democracies such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Serbia, and Sabina’s project studied these developments in detail.