scholarly journals Right-wing populism and feminist politics: The case of Law and Justice in Poland

2020 ◽  
pp. 019251212094891
Author(s):  
Anna Gwiazda

This article disentangles the complexity of right-wing populism and feminist politics using an original framework based on inputs (representative claims) and outputs (policies) to examine a Polish case. In 2015, the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS) formed a single-party majority government led by a female prime minister after winning the elections. PiS is ideologically conservative, promotes traditional and national values and is supported by the Catholic Church. Additionally, it is hostile towards what it calls ‘gender-ideology’ and is reluctant to implement feminist policies. This article also reveals that PiS represents conservative women’s interests and advocates an aspect of conservative feminism, therefore possessing a duality in its claims and policies. Overall, this article draws inferences about the nexus between social conservatism, populism and feminism, and thus seeks to contribute to the scholarly literature by examining a timely issue against the backdrop of rising populism, illiberalism and anti-gender campaigns.

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-167
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Korolczuk

Recent developments show that Poland’s anti-gender campaigns, initiated around 2012 by the Polish Catholic Church and ultraconservative organisations, will continue into the next parliamentary term. While the right-wing populist Law and Justice party has made attacks on ‘gender ideology’ a key element of the critique of individualism and neoliberal globalisation, anti-gender rhetoric is also today being adopted by neo-fascists, who combine a desire to maintain a gender hierarchy and hatred towards ‘sexual degenerates’ with anti-European Union sentiments and Islamophobia.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194016122110226
Author(s):  
Ayala Panievsky

As populist campaigns against the media become increasingly common around the world, it is ever more urgent to explore how journalists adopt and respond to them. Which strategies have journalists developed to maintain the public's trust, and what may be the implications for democracy? These questions are addressed using a thematic analysis of forty-five semistructured interviews with leading Israeli journalists who have been publicly targeted by Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The article suggests that while most interviewees asserted that adherence to objective reporting was the best response to antimedia populism, many of them have in fact applied a “strategic bias” to their reporting, intentionally leaning to the Right in an attempt to refute the accusations of media bias to the Left. This strategy was shaped by interviewees' perceived helplessness versus Israel's Prime Minister and his extensive use of social media, a phenomenon called here “the influence of presumed media impotence.” Finally, this article points at the potential ramifications of strategic bias for journalism and democracy. Drawing on Hallin's Spheres theory, it claims that the strategic bias might advance Right-wing populism at present, while also narrowing the sphere of legitimate controversy—thus further restricting press freedom—in the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 7-32
Author(s):  
Jarosław Tomasiewicz

Konfederacja Wolność i Niepodległość (Confederacy for Freedom and Independence) is new, far-right force in Poland. Success of the KWiN broke political monopoly of the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice) party on the right wing. The paper examines structure, strategy, ideology and social basis of the Confederacy. This new formation amalgamating cultural conservatism and economic liberalism is similar rather to American Trumpism and alt-right than the protest movements of Western-European right wing populism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Bohdana Kurylo

Abstract IR scholarship has recently seen a burgeoning interest in the right-wing populist politics of security, showing that it tends to align with the international ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’. In contrast, this article investigates how local feminist actors can resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: the Independence March organised by right-wing groups on Poland's Independence Day and the Women's Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The article draws on Judith Butler's theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the feminist movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The study expands the understanding of the relationship between populism, security and feminism in IR by exploring how the populist politics of security is differently enacted by everyday agents in local contexts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjetil Klette Bøhler

This article investigates the role of music in presidential election campaigns and political movements inspired by theoretical arguments in Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, John Dewey ́s pragmatist rethinking of aesthetics and existing scholarship on the politics of music. Specifically, it explores how musical rhythms and melodies enable new forms of political awareness, participation, and critique in an increasingly polarized Brazil through an ethnomusicological exploration of how left-wing and right-wing movements used music to disseminate politics during the 2018 election that culminated in the presidency of Jair Messias Bolsonaro. Three lessons can be learned. First, in Brazil, music breathes life, energy, and affective engagement into politics—sung arguments and joyful rhythms enrich public events and street demonstrations in complex and dynamic ways. Second, music is used by right-wing and left-wing movements in unique ways. For Bolsonaro supporters and right-wing movements, jingles, produced as part of larger election campaigns, were disseminated through massive sound cars in the heart of São Paulo while demonstrators sang the national anthem and waved Brazilian flags. In contrast, leftist musical politics appears to be more spontaneous and bohemian. Third, music has the ability to both humanize and popularize bolsonarismo movements that threaten human rights and the rights of ethnic minorities, among others, in contemporary Brazil. To contest bolsonarismo, Trumpism, and other forms of extreme right-wing populism, we cannot close our ears and listen only to grooves of resistance and songs of freedom performed by leftists. We must also listen to the music of the right.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Fischer ◽  
Quentin Atkinson ◽  
Ananish Chaudhuri

This chapter provides an overview of studies that use incentivised experiments to study political ideology. We look first at studies that conceptualise political ideology along a unidimensional liberal-conservative spectrum and explore whether there are behavioural differences between liberals and conservatives. While recent studies find that liberals display more pro-sociality, many other studies find that liberals and conservatives display similar levels of pro-social, ingroup-biased, normative, and punitive behaviour. We then turn to experiments that study two-dimensional political ideology as embodied in the concepts of economic conservatism/progressivism (often measured with the Social Dominance Orientation scale) and social conservatism/progressivism (usually measured with the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale). In such experiments, economic conservatives display lower levels of pro-sociality and universalism and greater tolerance of inequality and tendencies to harm outgroups. Social conservatives tend to display “groupishness”, including distrusting anonymous strangers, cooperating with ingroup members, following rules, punishing in the ultimatum game, and sometimes harming outgroups.


Author(s):  
Laurențiu Ștefan

In Romania, a highly segmented and extremely volatile party system has contributed to a predominance of coalition governments. Alternation in power by coalitions led by either left-wing or right-wing parties used to be a major feature of Romanian governments. Thus, until a short-lived grand coalition in 2009, ideologically homogeneous coalitions were the general practice. Since then, parties from the right and left of the political spectrum have learned to work together in government. Given the semi-presidential nature of the political regime and the exclusive power to nominate the prime minister, the Romanian president plays an important role in coalition formation. The president also plays a pivotal role by shadowing the prime minister and therefore influencing the governance of coalitions. She has the power to veto ministerial appointments and therefore she can also shape the cabinet line-up. Pre-election coalitions are a common feature, more than two-thirds of Romanian coalition governments have been predicated on such agreements. Coalition agreements dealt with both policy issues and coalition decision-making bodies and the governance mechanisms that have been in most cases enforced and complied with—until the break-up of the coalition and the downfall of the respective government. One very common decision-making body is the Coalition Committee, which has been backed on the operational level by an inner cabinet made up of the prime minister and the deputy prime ministers, which usually are the heads of the junior coalition parties.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 353-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Sandel

The right-wing populism ascendant today is a symptom of the failure of progressive politics. Central to this failure is the uncritical embrace of a neo-liberal version of globalization that benefits those at the top but leaves ordinary citizens feeling disempowered. Progressive parties are unlikely to win back public support unless they learn from the populist protest that has displaced them —not by replicating its xenophobia and strident nationalism, but by taking seriously the legitimate grievances with which these ugly sentiments are entangled. These grievances are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 989-997
Author(s):  
Dorota Szelewa

The main sets of ideas that dominated discourses on market-making and democratization in Eastern Europe during the 1990s concerned: first, the superiority of market-led mechanisms of exchange and distribution with individual responsibility and entrepreneurship; and second, the conservative gender order, with women disappearing from the public domain, now being responsible for domestic sphere and the biological reproduction of the nation. Suppressed when these countries were on the path for joining the European Union, the ideas have been now recurring in a new form, representing the basis for the right-wing populist turn in several of the post-communist countries.


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