Opposition Parties in Defence of Democracy: Changing discourse of Civic Platform in Poland in 2001-2020

The process of democratic backsliding in Poland had started in 2015 when the national-conservative party Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) ruled by Jarosław Kaczyński won the outright majority in the Polish parliamentary elections. Since 2015, the party has reduced the power of the president and parliament, imposed restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly, undermined the independence of the judiciary, weakened institutional checks and balances, and gained control over the state media. The main opposition force in the parliament during the period of democratic backsliding was represented by the liberal party Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, PO), the second-largest party in the Polish parliament in the observed period and one of the dominant parties in Poland since the 2000s. In 2018, together with smaller parties, PO had founded and headed the Civic Coalition (Koalicja Obywatelska, KO), the alliance that was formed in opposition to undemocratic decisions imposed by the ruling PiS party. In this study, we analyze how the discourse of the main opposition parties had changed during the period of democratic backsliding in Poland. In order to grasp changes in political narratives across time, we conducted a systematic qualitative (manual coding) and quantitative (based on the Affective Norms for Polish Words Reloaded dataset; Imbir 2016) analysis of the framing of democracy in the corpus of parliamentary speeches of PO/KO MPs in the years 2005-2020. The conceptualization of different models of democracy was based on the classification proposed by Varieties of Democracy (Coppedge et al. 2021). While the estimation of the effectiveness of democratic resilience in Poland is beyond the scope of this study, analysis of the parliamentary speeches provides an opportunity to track both quantitative and qualitative changes in how opposition parties talk about democracy under different contexts and how they react to the process of democratic backsliding initiated by the ruling party. Considering that challenges to the democratic system brought by PiS in 2015-2020 were related mainly to the liberal aspects of democracy, we expected acceleration of liberal democratic discourse in reaction to PiS’ undemocratic policies. Cross-time analysis of PO speeches based on different models of democracy allowed us to track those changes and to define specific aspects of democracy that became emphasized during the period of democratic backsliding. In addition, we demonstrate how democratic backsliding impacted emotional dimensions of PO/KO political narratives and their application of democratic concepts from positive/neutral towards increasingly negative.