Search

This is a data repository accompanying the manuscript "Hollowed or redefined? Changing visions of democracy in the political discourse of Law and Justice", Democratization, DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2022.2152439 by Agnieszka Kwiatkowska, Viktoriia Muliavka, and Hubert Plisiecki The accompanying code used for processing can be found at https://github.com/hplisiecki/DemPiS---Speeches-on-democracy-by-Law-and-Justice-Prawo-i-SPrawiedliwo-PiS-MPs-2001-2021

This chapter deals with the role of religion in the political narrative and the activities of the Law and Justice (PiS) party. PiS won both parliamentary and presidential elections in 2015. It was for the first time in post-communist Poland that one electoral list controlled a majority in both chambers of parliament. The unprecedented victory enabled a far-reaching and highly controversial political and legal campaign called by its architects a "Good Change". The Conservative character of PiS and its good relations with the Catholic Church may suggest that the influence of religion and Church institutions may have risen in the years following the party’s success. The chapter has three main objectives. Firstly, it seeks to depict the role of religion in the political narrative of the "Good Change" political campaign. Secondly, it assesses the scope of PiS's actual political initiatives concerning religious issues after the elections. Thirdly, it explores whether and how this narrative and the initiatives are grounded in social reality. The timeframe for the analysis is the period of the first three years of the PiS government.

Europe has witnessed radical change since 2014, with the Crimean annexation and immigration crisis creating fertile ground for national populists, paramilitaries, and hybrid war strategies in Germany, Poland, and Sweden. This thesis explores 100 years of paramilitary history with particular emphasis on the post-2014 time frame. The historical evidence answers two questions; how paramilitaries are endangering the state’s monopoly on violence amid changing civil-military relationships, and how policy can mitigate pathological paramilitary threats while improving local security given contemporary threats? The region is divided in outlook. One considers paramilitaries a malignant far-right extremist cadre. Another considers them extensions of the military-security apparatus under the state’s purview. Another has societal-militarization concepts that paramilitaries do not fit into, so they are left out entirely. These broad camps represent the respective approaches to paramilitarism of Germany, Poland, and Sweden. These three case studies suggest that militias and nationalism are expanding across borders as a backlash against Europe’s core political and economic arrangements—often with Russian encouragement—in various measures and degrees in each state. Still, the paramilitary phenomenon is a potential source of strength where states improve civil-military relations with prudent paramilitary directives. Lieutenant, United States Navy Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.

By departing from the debate on the EU’s rule of law violations in Hungary and Poland, this thesis examines how the Europeanisation process can explain the violations of the EU’s rule of law in Hungary (2010-2020) and Poland (2015-2020), and the differences and similarities herein. The thesis draws on top-down Europeanisation that includes the misfit hypothesis, facilitating factors that have enabled change in the domestic policies and polities, and measurement. This is complemented with the actor-centric theories of rational and sociological institutionalism that emphasise illiberal preferences and nationalist beliefs. The thesis applies a comparative research that focuses on the differences in the processes and qualitative content analyses based on documents. The thesis finds that Europeanisation processes in Hungary and Poland are characterised by retrenchment, i.e. De-Europeanisation. Particularly, domestic facilitating factors such as reduced multiple veto-points, change of formal institutions, the governments’ role as agents of change, and use of informal institutions such as domestic political cultures have led to domestic changes. These processes unfold differently: in Hungary, the government shapes a national identity and legally changes the political system. In Poland, the government is the protector of traditional values and unconstitutionally changes the political system.

International audience; La crise du COVID-19 a renforcé les tensions politiques dans les pays d’Europe centrale. Dans les pays déjà engagés sur la voie autoritaire, la crise sanitaire ne menace pas seulement, comme c’est le cas ailleurs, certaines libertés mais tout un ensemble de règles démocratiques. En Hongrie, la loi permettant au Premier ministre Viktor Orbán de gouverner par décrets pour une durée illimitée a suscité l’indignation. Le champ politique polonais a plongé dans le chaos à l’approche de l’élection présidentielle. Pour se garder de tout exceptionnalisme, il convient d’observer en détail les enjeux spécifiques à chacun des pays si l’on veut analyser l’exercice autoritaire du pouvoir par des dirigeants qui revendiquent le statut de « démocratie illibérale », voire « antilibérale ».