Protesting civil society in Poland. Towards a pillarized structure?

The debate about the civil society in Poland suggests that the processes of political and economic liberalization after 1989 were multiple and have contradictory effects on different social groups. Particularly important was the progressive institutionalization of the new social structure as a result of top-down economic and political reforms and disappearance of the old features of the class structure. These processes were followed by a wide variety of expressing political and economic interests, many different forms of social organizations and the state's response to contentious claims. Grzegorz Ekiert (2020) argues that the organizational trajectory of civil society in Poland has fundamental features directing it towards cultural and political polarization, which in effect facilitates the current turn of the country towards authoritarianism. According to the author since the country's transition to democracy in 1989, Polish civil society has evolved into an organizational form that can be described as the "pillarized civil society". This phenomenon concerns the vertical segmentation of civil society into sectors that have their own organizational resources, normative orientations and, consequently, their own patterns of building protest coalitions. As Ekiert demonstrates after 2015, this process has continued to deepen. The electoral support for anti-liberal and anti-European parties defined political conflicts and protest politics, reinforcing the vertical segmentation of civil society. The support of the Law and Justice for the extreme right-wing organizations further consolidated the cultural polarization of Polish civil society. Despite the formulation of a strong thesis about "pillarized civil society," it has not yet been empirically verified. Assuming that the variable number of actors behind the organization of protest events reflect the nature of collective identities in the civil society I ask the question whether and to what extent coalitions of protest in Polish civil society are being formed under the impact of specific political opportunities that have arisen in Poland in the year 2020. Using a collection of protest events drawn from Polish newspapers, Girvan-Newman clustering methods, betweenness centrality measures and core-periphery algorithm of network analysis are employed to map the civil society protest actors coalitions and specify what it implies that Polish civil society may be perceived as a pillarized vertical structure.