To What Extent and Why? Measuring Populism in Polish Party Manifestos

The aim of the project is to determine the level of populism of Polish political parties in the years 2001-2023 (basis of the electoral manifestos). Populism was assumed to be not a binary, but a gradual phenomenon (Hawkins 2009, Bonikowski & Gidron 2016, Aslanidis 2018, Çay and Kalkamanova 2023). The key element in defining the term "populism" is the category of “people”, because only in relation to them we can talk about the “elite”, the “general will” (Mudde 2017) or the “enemy”. Without reference to the people, we cannot talk about populism, but about other phenomena. However, mere references to the “people” do not constitute “populism” in the strict sense. For this research, the closest approach is that of Jagers and Walgrave (2007). Thanks to their division into “thin” (“empty”), and “thick” (“anti-elitist”, “exclusionary” and “complete”) populism, it will be possible to more precisely determine what kind of populism we are dealing with. The operationalization of the above-mentioned concepts will be based on modified proposals already available in the literature (Blassnig 2019), adapted to the specificity of Poland. It was therefore assumed that populism consists of four general characteristics: appeals to the people, negative appeals to the elites, exclusion or blaming groups of "others", and manichaean opposition of "us" versus "them". The codebook used in the work of Stępińska & Lipiński (2020) was adopted with minor modifications. The people may have the following character: geographical, legal, political, economic, moral, general. The elites were divided into: political (system, parties, politicians), economic, media, judicial, international, intellectual, religious, military. The enemy is the antithesis of the people, therefore in such circumstances, there are six categories: geographical, legal, political, economic, moral, and general. The manichean “us-them” division is a positive presentation of "us" with a simultaneous negative presentation of "them" - elites or others. The main research hypotheses assume that the level of populism: (1) has been systematically increasing from one parliamentary term of office to another; (2) in the programs of opposition parties is higher than in the programs of the governing parties (Bobba & McDonnell 2016); (3) in the programs of extra-parliamentary parties is higher than in the programs of parliamentary parties; (4) in the programs of extreme parties is higher than in the programs of centrist parties – both on the GAL-TAN axis and on the economic axis (Ernst et al. 2017). For qualitative analysis the program MAXQDA2024 will be used. The unit of analysis is assumed to be the sentence. Each analysed sentence could score from 0 to N points, 1 point for sentence, in which wanted dimensions will be presented. The total number of coded signs in material is divided by the number all signs in the document, and the result of this action shows the degree of populism of the material analysed, which will be a populist index.