Initiators or participants? The position of political parties in protest coalitions in Poland, 2020

Much ink has been spilt on conceptual and empirical analysis of the relationship between parties and social movements. McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001) emphasized the need to understand this relationship as the interaction between two sorts of politics involving similar causal processes. Social movements may provide mass support during elections, helping mobilize people to vote for a particular party (McAdam & Tarrow, 2010; Schlozman, 2015). In turn, political parties legitimize movements and support their goals in the field of extra-parliamentary politics (Kriesi, 2004; 2015). The analysis of these relations has also become an important area of research in the contemporary sociology of social protests, but relatively little has been said about how parties participate in collective actions. Do they initiate protest events by occupying a central position in the main streams of events or merely join events that have already developed into a cycle of protest? In 2020, extraordinary political opportunities have arisen for the formation of broad protest coalitions in Poland. Most notably, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the government introducing regulations which provoked objections from many social groups. Dozens of existing organizations that had not been active in the streets before, as well as new initiatives that formed directly in response to new regulations, mobilized in response to government actions. Political parties also took part in the protests in an effort to manifest their presence. However, their role in the protests is not clear and requires empirical analysis. In order to determine to what extent the 2020 political parties played roles in the integration of coalition protests, I will map the network of actors participating in the protests. I employ protest event analysis and social network analysis. Using the online archives of Gazeta Wyborcza, the largest Polish liberal daily newspaper, I searched for mentions in the newspaper’s archives containing the repertories (phrases) describing the protests in 2020 and to reconstruct network of coalitions in 2020 (only events with at least two unique actors were selected for the sample). Each examined month was supplemented with the electronic databases of Rzeczpospolita, a nationwide economic and legal journal established in 1920 as a medium for the conservative Christian National Party. I employ dynamic line-graphs to bipartite networks (Broccotelli, Evertt, Koskinen 2016) for incorporating time directly into the network. Bi-dynamic line-graph is an innovative way to visualize the evolution of actors’ participation in successive events. The main implication of this method is that all time steps corresponding to events, are, in fact, directly taken into account, and actions, linked together by the common participation of actors, are represented as a chain, in a sort of continuous social process. Employing this method, it is possible to recognize to what extent a political party's participation precedes the occurrence of major protest events or, conversely, to what extent parties take advantage of protests that have already occurred to make their presence visible.