Deteriorating quality of deliberation or discursive resilience against democratic backsliding? A news media perspective on the EU-Poland Rule of Law conflict

In the face of a possible Polexit, and with several other EU governments either failing to tackle rule-of-law issues or weakening democracy themselves (Liberties Rule of Law Report 2023), it is more pressing than ever to articulate what the EU can and should do to mitigate rule-of-law deterioration within its own ranks. The impact of the current RoL battle will depend on domestic political opinion and civil society mobilization, which are both likely to be affected by news media coverage. It is, therefore, crucial to understand how the conflict is portrayed in news media across EU member states. Focusing on Poland as our benchmark case, we investigate the extent to which, in the context of the current EU RoL conflict, domestic news coverage either facilitates a (discursive) shrinking of civic spaces in favour of the national government, or it has the potential to enhance democratic resilience by adhering to deliberative standards. Poland lends itself as a yardstick case of democratic backsliding and possible ways to mitigate this, as the outcome of the RoL conflict there is not yet determined. On the one hand, Eurobarometer surveys consistently show above-EU average public support for EU integration and EU institutions in Poland, even after the ‘eruption’ of the Rule of Law conflict, EU economic sanctions and a looming Polexit. On the other hand, the ingredients for government-favouring rally-around-the-flag public discourse are in place (media ownership control, ‘classic’ Eurosceptic claims based on ‘enemy-fication’ of the EU /EU institutions, exclusion of dissenting voices from media infrastructure and delegitimising public discourse). However, domestic news media coverage, which can function as the catalyst in determining the outcome of the RoL conflict in Poland in terms of who will win over Polish public opinion, is currently under-researched. Deploying a mixed-methods design anchored in claims-making analysis, we classify an original dataset of nearly 5000 news articles published in the period 2016-2023 in popular Polish news outlets. We use quantitative and qualitative variables to map the visibility of RoL events, of actors, variation of news coverage in favour or against either the EU or the Polish government across pro- and anti- government news outlets, variation over time and variation of theme and quality of arguments.