Disgrace, Dishonour and Shame: The Rise of Extreme Rhetoric in Polish Parliament.

In the last ten years, we have observed a clear increase in extreme political rhetoric in parliamentary debate in Poland. One of the ways the progressing radicalization of the language is manifested is through the frequent use of words with high negative emotional intensity to describe the events occurring in the ordinary, everyday politics, which leads to the degradation of their meaning. With the increase in the frequency of their use in politics, words like "shame," "disgrace" or "treason" ceased to describe only shocking, memorable historical events and widened their meaning to cover the political activity of the opponents in the parliament. In this Paper I analyze the changes in the language used in the party competition using the transcripts of parliamentary debates. I use a set of all speeches related to the idea of shame, treason, disgrace and scandal automatically chosen from a full data set of speeches in both chambers of the Polish parliament in the years 1991-2016, combining them with the corresponding results of the roll call voting and with socio-demographic and political data of the Polish MPs. Searching for latent topics using Structural Topic Modeling allows me to specify the context in which the extreme language is the most probable to appear and how it changed over time, who uses it most often, and how it influences the government-opposition dynamics of competition. My findings show that the use of uncivil language is increasing in time and appears mainly in the context of national identity issues, extreme accusations are more frequent at the end of the term, and suppressing the opposition voice in the parliament results in increase of non-statutory interruptions of the speeches.