Changing visions of democracy

De-democratization (Bogaards 2018), autocratization (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019) or illiberal turn (Hanley and Vachudova 2018) in Hungary and Poland has rendered theories about the consolidation of political systems in the Central and Eastern Europe (Ágh 1998) obsolete. Gradual decline in the quality of democracy, including violation of civil rights and freedoms, subordination of the judiciary system to the government, violation of the rule of law, media freedom, and freedom of public activity of political parties and non-governmental organizations oppositional to the ruling party (Freedom House 2020), was accompanied by changes in selection and salience (Entman 1993) of different visions of democracy. In this article, we conduct a mixed-methods analysis of the types of framing of democracy in the Polish parliamentary discourse in 1991-2020. We use Dynamic Embedded Topic Model (D-ETM, Dieng et al. 2019) on speeches on democracy to discover the main frames and contexts of democracy, their change over time and inter-party differences in their usage. Then, we follow the main visions of democracy with qualitative analysis of speeches, with a focus on the change brought about by the Law and Justice (PiS) in recent years.