From Liberalism’s Shadow: The Conceptual Topography of Illiberalism Studies

Political Studies Review. 2026.

Bragina E., Mikhaylova O.

The notion of illiberalism has become central to contemporary political debate, yet scholarly attempts to define it as an ideology remain fragmented and conceptually diffuse. This article empirically reconstructs the evolving architecture of illiberalism as a field of ideological inquiry. Drawing on a bibliometric analysis of 450 academic articles published between 1962 and 2025, it maps the co-occurrence of key concepts to show how the discourse has consolidated, diversified, and redefined itself over time. The resulting conceptual network reveals an intellectual field structured around four thematic domains linking debates on democracy, governance, the state, and ideology. The analysis identifies 2017 as a pivotal inflection point, marking a shift from dispersed theorization to a more unified discourse responding to real-world political crises and democratic erosion. Beyond tracing the field’s empirical contours, the study advances a theoretical claim: illiberalism operates less as a discrete ideology than as an ideological grammar internal to liberal democracy – one that performs its own critique by reconfiguring the boundaries of freedom, sovereignty, and legitimacy.

Keywords: democracy, liberalism, populism, bibliometric analysis, democratic backsliding, illiberalism, Co-occurrence network