The Republican Party has lurched towards populism and illiberalism

ON NOVEMBER 3RD tens of millions of Americans will cast their ballots for the Republican Party. But they will not be voting for the party of Ronald Reagan, or even of George W. Bush. Breaking with his predecessors, President Donald Trump has steered America’s conservative party towards protectionism and xenophobia, while disregarding norms of political behaviour at home and abroad, and weakening liberal values and institutions. According to new research by the V-Dem Institute, a think-tank based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Republicans have become more populist and less liberal under Mr Trump’s leadership than at any time in recent history.

The Swedish research group created a database of 1,955 political parties from 169 countries, going back to 1970, and invited 665 academics and country experts to score them across a number of values. The V-Dem Institute then created two indices, based on the experts’ responses. The first index, populism, measures the extent to which a political party says it is against elites and favours majority rule over consensus. The second, illiberalism, evaluates parties based on several criteria, including how likely they are to launch personal attacks against their opponents, to what extent they support free speech and fair elections, how likely they are to violate the rights of minorities and whether or not they encourage violence against their political rivals.

In the late 20th century the Republican Party already looked a bit less liberal and more populist than most mainstream European parties. But according to the V-Dem Institute’s analysis, it only really started to deviate to “illiberalism” when it embraced religious values under Mr Bush after his election in 2000. The party then veered into populism in 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party movement, which vowed to curb what it saw as the unjustifiable expansion of the federal government under Barack Obama. However, the greatest shift, especially towards illiberalism, came with the election of Mr Trump.

According to the V-Dem Institute’s metrics, Mr Trump’s party is now more similar to Europe’s most right-wing parties, such as Law and Justice in Poland or Fidesz in Hungary, than to any mainstream political group in western Europe. The Democratic Party has also flirted with populism in recent years—but not nearly to the same extent as the Republicans.