Protesting Parties 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 emphasized the need to understand this relationship as the interaction between two sorts of politics involving similar causal processes. 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. 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. One of the central hypotheses explored in this study is the degree to which the COVID-19 pandemic influenced the nature of political parties' involvement in protests. The findings suggest that the pandemic had a significant, albeit varied, impact on the strategies of different political factions. While some parties appeared to leverage the pandemic to amplify their presence and influence in protests, others showed a more cautious approach, recalibrating their participation in response to the unfolding public health crisis. Second hypothesis concerns the solidarity or divergence among political parties in Poland in response to the pandemic. The study indicates that while the pandemic served as a unifying factor on certain issues, ideological differences remained pronounced. Parties continued to exhibit distinct strategic approaches and policy stances, suggesting that the pandemic did not completely override pre-existing political ideologies and agendas. The primary unit of analysis employed in this study is the protest event, with daily newspapers serving as the data source for these events. Such events fall under "non-conventional" forms of political engagement and typically take place in the streets. 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.