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The analysis presented in this article tries to address a puzzle – the widely recognized process of democratic backsliding in Poland was accompanied by a steady increase in popular support for democracy. It poses a question if the two phenomena are substantively related. To establish possible connections between them, I test three hypotheses involving populist winner effect, deepening of socio-political cleavage, and generational change. The first one assumes that democracy is more supported by populists when they form a government; the second one – to the contrary – states that populist polarization creates a wider gap in support for democracy, while the third one proposes that the relation is spurious, as trends in attitudes represent a gradual, long-term social change, at least in part related to generational replacement. Results show that the direct link between populist democratic backsliding and pro-democracy surge is relatively weak, while both processes can be related to a deeper sociological process of 'splintering' within Polish society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on national, political, and social identities in the study of populism is typically limited to analysing populist identity framing in political and media discourses and measuring its effects on individual populist attitudes. Thus, the self-identification of populists' supporters, i.e. how they relate to populist identity framing when reflexively constructing their identities, remains largely unexplored. To address this issue, the article introduces the concept of relational popular identity, capturing the complexities of late-modern political identities, and the relational identity mapping technique used to investigate the web of relations forming these identities. The article also presents a case study of loyal voters of the Law and Justice party in Poland and discusses how a relational right-wing popular identity may serve as an 'intermediary identity' that articulates elements of other identities to maintain their integrity and a 'community of last resort' that unites the 'real' people through an immunitarian mechanism of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Anthropologica is the property of CASCA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)