Pytlas, B. (2021): "From Mainstream to Power: The Law and Justice Party in Poland" in: Decker, F./Henningsen, B./Lewandowsky, M./Adorf, P. (eds.) "Aufstand der Außenseiter. Die Herausforderung der europäischen Politik durch den neuen Populismus". Baden-Baden: Nomos, 401-414
This chapter focuses on core ideological positions of the Law and Justice party in Poland, its ta... more This chapter focuses on core ideological positions of the Law and Justice party in Poland, its tactical accommodation and adjustment of populist and nativist narratives, as well as current dynamics and impact of the party’s repeated shift from mainstream to power. Observing the tactical toolkit of PiS can help us understand how political entrepreneurs can flexibly react to changing contexts of party competition, as well as craft their own opportunities for political mobilisation.
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Books by Bartek Pytlas
[Paperback in Winter 2017]
In Central and Eastern Europe, radical right actors significantly impact public debates and mainstream policy agenda. But despite this high discursive influence, the electoral fortune of radical right parties in the region is much less stable. It has been suggested that this may be due to the fact that mainstream competitors increasingly co-opt issues which are fundamental for the radical right. However, the extent to which such tactics play a role in radical right electoral success and failure is still a subject for debate.
This book is the first to provide a systematic theoretical framework and in-depth empirical research on the interaction between discursive influence, party competition and the electoral fortune of radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe. It argues that in order to fully explain the impact of mainstream party strategies in this regard, it is vital to widen the analysis beyond competition over issues themselves, and towards their various legitimizing narratives and frame ownership. Up-to-date debates over policies of collective identity (minority, morality and nationalizing politics) in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia serve as best cases to observe these under-researched phenomena. The analytical model is evaluated comparatively using original, primary data combined with election studies and expert surveys.
Advancing an innovative, fine-grained approach on the mechanisms and effects of party competition between radical right and mainstream parties, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching the far right and European party politics, as well as political contestation and framing.
Papers by Bartek Pytlas
TAESD maps the diversity of ‘thin-ideological’ messages beyond just populism. The dataset includes continuous measures which capture the salience of: anti-establishment rhetoric, people-centrism, as well as appeals to populist general will, technocratic expertise and extraordinary political vocation.
Please cite as:
Pytlas, B (forthc.) Beyond Populism: The Diversity of Thin Anti-Establishment Contestation in Turbulent Times. Party Politics.
Pytlas, B (2022). Thin Anti-Establishment Supply Dataset (TAESD). https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F23HM
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In recent decades, radical right politics increasingly entered the political mainstream. Against this background, this contribution explores mechanisms of radical right agency in the political process. Based on extant research it argues that in order to better understand these dynamic and interactive processes we need to expand our optic towards the narrative dimension of party competition between radical right challengers and their conventional competitors. Party competition is not only a spatial contest over ownership of issues, but also a contest over their dominant meaning (frame ownership). The politicization of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Slovakia and Hungary after 2015 provides crucial cases to systematically explore framing strategies of radical right challengers and conventional government parties. Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis of online election campaigns provides empirical evidence that conventional parties did not ‘merely’ adopt restrictive positions on asylum policy, but also legitimized them with nativist threat narratives. Fidesz in Hungary demonstrates a case where a conventional government party dominated the agenda with its own overarching radical right master frame. Despite these copying strategies, radical and extreme right „originals“ managed to keep their distinctive feature in party competition by shifting their normalized threat scenarios to other issues of collective identity policy (Slovakia) or by ‘repackaging’ nativist frames as allegedly ‘de-ideologized’ expert politics (Hungary). The findings have broader implications for researching radical right agenda-setting, framing and competition strategies. The analysis also contributes to a deeper understanding of mainstreaming processes of radical right politics and its impact on European party systems and liberal democracy.
Democracies in Central Eastern Europe continuously struggle against the upsurge of radical right parties. Yet, scholarly research on this topic has hitherto largely omitted their influence on agenda-setting, policy making or the party system. Departing from empirical observations of party competition between radical right parties and their mainstream competitors along the socio-cultural cleavage, this contribution seeks to shed light on the influence of these parties on positional shifts – disseminated into spatial and narrative ones – within the party systems in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. First, an evaluation of expert survey data will be carried out to identify spatial shifts in the field of politics of collective identity. Second, qualitative observations of political competition shall reveal the mechanisms, timing, and extent of these shifts. We argue that a viable threat of a radical right party will lead to either an overall rightward shift in the party system or to increasing polarization between a left and a right camp. In contrast, the decline of radical right parties is accompanied by a convergence of the mainstream parties. In any case, the nearby competitors of the radical right always shifted towards the right, following a strategy of issue and frame co-optation.
"While the overall electoral fortune of radical right parties in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe is similar to their West European counterparts, they are distinct in ideological and organizational terms as well as in the degree of fluidity within the party family. As the cases of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and others tell, radical right parties come and go, they reorganize and rename themselves. This suggests less stable cleavage structures than in Western Europe where many such parties can count on a solid bloc of faithful voters which stem disproportionately from the working class.
Hence, the article addresses the question to what extent the legacy of a “class-less society” in post-Communist countries is reflected by an absence of class structures and class appeal in those parties‘electoral performance.
A first glance at the social characteristics of their electorates reveals a mix of working or lower class and rural support in addition to specific regional variations. The article attempts to provide longitudinal data on the radical right electorate’s class composition in countries where these parties have entered parliaments (Poland, Hungary and Slovakia) and to link it to class-based framing efforts of the radical right.
We argue that in our cases, market-liberal agenda retreats behind appeals designed to bridge class differences and to exploit anti-capitalist sentiments. By doing this, the radical right, in its effort to exploit some legacies of the past, prolongs it into the present.""
The case of Law and Justice in Poland allows to observe not only how a move of populism from mainstream to sole power impacts liberal democracy. It also provides insights into the rhetorical toolbox of populist politics in government. It demonstrates how ruling populist actors fend off challenges to their legitimizing narrative of representing the General Will of ‘the Sovereign’ against antagonistic ‘detached’ Elites coming from party politics and – most importantly – from grassroots protests by the civil society.
http://www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=5055
-----
For a long time, radical right parties were believed to act outside the mainstream. They were treated as an isolated, ephemeral, crisis-related phenomenon on the fringes of established, consolidated democracies. The negative impact of their discourse on the quality of liberal democracies has hence been mostly downplayed. In the wake of the developments in the last several years, this view has changed. Most recently, the politicisation of anti-immigration rhetoric throughout many parts of Europe, as well as the success of mainstream advocates of ‘illiberal democracy’ in Poland and Hungary, have yet again shown that issues central to the radical right, legitimised by exclusionary nativist narratives, have to a larger or lesser extent arrived in the midst of European democracies.
Published as: Pytlas, Bartek (2015): “Hungary, Poland and Slovakia show the risks associated with mainstream parties co-opting the platforms of the radical right”. LSE EUROPP Blog, 3. November 2015.
Published as: Pytlas, Bartek (2015): “The Polish presidential election highlights increasing disenchantment with the country’s political establishment”. LSE EUROPP Blog, 19. May 2015.
[Paperback in Winter 2017]
In Central and Eastern Europe, radical right actors significantly impact public debates and mainstream policy agenda. But despite this high discursive influence, the electoral fortune of radical right parties in the region is much less stable. It has been suggested that this may be due to the fact that mainstream competitors increasingly co-opt issues which are fundamental for the radical right. However, the extent to which such tactics play a role in radical right electoral success and failure is still a subject for debate.
This book is the first to provide a systematic theoretical framework and in-depth empirical research on the interaction between discursive influence, party competition and the electoral fortune of radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe. It argues that in order to fully explain the impact of mainstream party strategies in this regard, it is vital to widen the analysis beyond competition over issues themselves, and towards their various legitimizing narratives and frame ownership. Up-to-date debates over policies of collective identity (minority, morality and nationalizing politics) in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia serve as best cases to observe these under-researched phenomena. The analytical model is evaluated comparatively using original, primary data combined with election studies and expert surveys.
Advancing an innovative, fine-grained approach on the mechanisms and effects of party competition between radical right and mainstream parties, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching the far right and European party politics, as well as political contestation and framing.
TAESD maps the diversity of ‘thin-ideological’ messages beyond just populism. The dataset includes continuous measures which capture the salience of: anti-establishment rhetoric, people-centrism, as well as appeals to populist general will, technocratic expertise and extraordinary political vocation.
Please cite as:
Pytlas, B (forthc.) Beyond Populism: The Diversity of Thin Anti-Establishment Contestation in Turbulent Times. Party Politics.
Pytlas, B (2022). Thin Anti-Establishment Supply Dataset (TAESD). https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F23HM
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In recent decades, radical right politics increasingly entered the political mainstream. Against this background, this contribution explores mechanisms of radical right agency in the political process. Based on extant research it argues that in order to better understand these dynamic and interactive processes we need to expand our optic towards the narrative dimension of party competition between radical right challengers and their conventional competitors. Party competition is not only a spatial contest over ownership of issues, but also a contest over their dominant meaning (frame ownership). The politicization of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Slovakia and Hungary after 2015 provides crucial cases to systematically explore framing strategies of radical right challengers and conventional government parties. Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis of online election campaigns provides empirical evidence that conventional parties did not ‘merely’ adopt restrictive positions on asylum policy, but also legitimized them with nativist threat narratives. Fidesz in Hungary demonstrates a case where a conventional government party dominated the agenda with its own overarching radical right master frame. Despite these copying strategies, radical and extreme right „originals“ managed to keep their distinctive feature in party competition by shifting their normalized threat scenarios to other issues of collective identity policy (Slovakia) or by ‘repackaging’ nativist frames as allegedly ‘de-ideologized’ expert politics (Hungary). The findings have broader implications for researching radical right agenda-setting, framing and competition strategies. The analysis also contributes to a deeper understanding of mainstreaming processes of radical right politics and its impact on European party systems and liberal democracy.
Democracies in Central Eastern Europe continuously struggle against the upsurge of radical right parties. Yet, scholarly research on this topic has hitherto largely omitted their influence on agenda-setting, policy making or the party system. Departing from empirical observations of party competition between radical right parties and their mainstream competitors along the socio-cultural cleavage, this contribution seeks to shed light on the influence of these parties on positional shifts – disseminated into spatial and narrative ones – within the party systems in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. First, an evaluation of expert survey data will be carried out to identify spatial shifts in the field of politics of collective identity. Second, qualitative observations of political competition shall reveal the mechanisms, timing, and extent of these shifts. We argue that a viable threat of a radical right party will lead to either an overall rightward shift in the party system or to increasing polarization between a left and a right camp. In contrast, the decline of radical right parties is accompanied by a convergence of the mainstream parties. In any case, the nearby competitors of the radical right always shifted towards the right, following a strategy of issue and frame co-optation.
"While the overall electoral fortune of radical right parties in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe is similar to their West European counterparts, they are distinct in ideological and organizational terms as well as in the degree of fluidity within the party family. As the cases of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and others tell, radical right parties come and go, they reorganize and rename themselves. This suggests less stable cleavage structures than in Western Europe where many such parties can count on a solid bloc of faithful voters which stem disproportionately from the working class.
Hence, the article addresses the question to what extent the legacy of a “class-less society” in post-Communist countries is reflected by an absence of class structures and class appeal in those parties‘electoral performance.
A first glance at the social characteristics of their electorates reveals a mix of working or lower class and rural support in addition to specific regional variations. The article attempts to provide longitudinal data on the radical right electorate’s class composition in countries where these parties have entered parliaments (Poland, Hungary and Slovakia) and to link it to class-based framing efforts of the radical right.
We argue that in our cases, market-liberal agenda retreats behind appeals designed to bridge class differences and to exploit anti-capitalist sentiments. By doing this, the radical right, in its effort to exploit some legacies of the past, prolongs it into the present.""
The case of Law and Justice in Poland allows to observe not only how a move of populism from mainstream to sole power impacts liberal democracy. It also provides insights into the rhetorical toolbox of populist politics in government. It demonstrates how ruling populist actors fend off challenges to their legitimizing narrative of representing the General Will of ‘the Sovereign’ against antagonistic ‘detached’ Elites coming from party politics and – most importantly – from grassroots protests by the civil society.
http://www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=5055
-----
For a long time, radical right parties were believed to act outside the mainstream. They were treated as an isolated, ephemeral, crisis-related phenomenon on the fringes of established, consolidated democracies. The negative impact of their discourse on the quality of liberal democracies has hence been mostly downplayed. In the wake of the developments in the last several years, this view has changed. Most recently, the politicisation of anti-immigration rhetoric throughout many parts of Europe, as well as the success of mainstream advocates of ‘illiberal democracy’ in Poland and Hungary, have yet again shown that issues central to the radical right, legitimised by exclusionary nativist narratives, have to a larger or lesser extent arrived in the midst of European democracies.
Published as: Pytlas, Bartek (2015): “Hungary, Poland and Slovakia show the risks associated with mainstream parties co-opting the platforms of the radical right”. LSE EUROPP Blog, 3. November 2015.
Published as: Pytlas, Bartek (2015): “The Polish presidential election highlights increasing disenchantment with the country’s political establishment”. LSE EUROPP Blog, 19. May 2015.
However, despite the unprecedented high public salience of European issues and the prominent rise of a viable threat from a new Eurosceptic competitor, direct debates about the future of Europe were missing. European issues themselves were largely skirted around during the campaign and served rather as proxies
for domestic issues used to further legitimize the dominating CDU narrative of security and stabilization."
In contrast to most extant approaches, this paper argues that protest and sincere populist radical right party vote cannot be seen as synonymous with a choice motivated respectively by dissatisfaction or ideological positioning. Not only can a vote perceived as a protest note to established parties be programmatic. Most especially, revisiting classical and newest literature, this article claims that high discontent can also drive sincere allegiance to the chosen actor, subjectively perceived as the only viable vehicle for a desired change. These unifying propositions are confirmed by a comparative quantitative analysis of electoral breakthrough by the Alternative for Germany. Subsequent qualitative analysis further suggests that the predominant protest or sincere vote character fuelled by particular motivations is congruent with the specific anti-establishment
framing of PRRP issue supply. The insights offer a deeper understanding of the mechanisms, patterns and consequences behind broadening voter mobilization and mainstreaming political agency by PRRPs.