Hijacking Democracy: Anti-Establishment Politics and Counter-Representation Strategies in Poland

Anti-establishment politics has itself become an established sight. Yet we nonetheless still lack a framework that would allow to explore this versatile and mercurial phenomenon under a single analytical roof. This challenge becomes particularly evident once we consider that political actors – “new” and “old” – may attempt to portray themselves both as distinct from mainstream politics and as an established political option viable to bring about fundamental political change. Based on extant research, this paper thus develops a unified typology of interactive anti-establishment strategies of counter-representation. The case study of the 2015 electoral campaign in Poland is particularly suited to demonstrate the analytical added value of the presented approach. Using computer-assisted qualitative content analysis, I measure discursive strategies of both conventional and non-conventional political parties. The analysis demonstrates that political actors can use a rich and dynamic entrepreneurial repertoire applied to issues on the horizontal and vertical dimensions of politics. Furthermore, by accounting for ways in which parties mainstream and blur their anti-establishment narratives, the empirical analysis also unveils a more insidious entrepreneurial strategy of counter-representation: one not explicitly promising a new, antithetical interpretation of current democratic idea but rather its supposed “refinement”, effectively hijacking democracy from within. The findings open new perspectives for empirical analysis of anti-establishment politics, deepening our understanding of dynamic patterns and impact of this multidimensional political agency.