PiS vs LGBT: The “Othering” of the LGBT Movement as an Element of Populist Radical Right Party Discourse in Poland

PiS vs LGBT: The “Othering” of the LGBT Movement as an Element of Populist Radical Right Party Discourse in PolandThe article explores how the LGBT movement is “othered” to fit into right-wing populist discourse and is thereby utilised as an element of a political strategy by right-wing populist actors. I focus on Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), a Polish populist radical right party (continuously in power since 2015), whose anti-LGBT rhetoric increased anew ahead of the 2019 European Parliament election. This study presents the results of a critical discourse analysis (conducted using Ruth Wodak and Martin Reisigl’s analytical framework) of selected texts and visuals from the party’s official website and from Twitter accounts of its prominent members. I analysed how the party representatives “other” LGBT Poles using discursive means, and how they frame homophobia within their broader populist discourse and instrumentalise it for political gains. I compare my findings to the findings from an analysis of Law and Justice’s anti-migration discourse ahead of the 2015 parliamentary election. The study is conducted within the framework of a larger study on “othering” as part of contemporary right-wing populism in Central and Eastern Europe. PiS vs LGBT. Kształtowanie obrazu „Innego” w przypadku ruchu LGBT jako element dyskursu populistycznej radykalnej partii prawicowej w PolsceArtykuł analizuje, w jaki sposób ruch LGBT jest przedstawiany jako „Inny” w celu dopasowania go do prawicowego populistycznego dyskursu, a tym samym jak jest wykorzystywany jako element strategii politycznej przez prawicowych populistycznych aktorów. Koncentruję się na Prawie i Sprawiedliwości, polskiej populistycznej partii radykalnej prawicy (u władzy nieprzerwanie od 2015 roku), której retoryka anty-LGBT nasiliła się na nowo przed wyborami do Parlamentu Europejskiego w 2019 roku. Przeprowadzając krytyczną analizę dyskursu (w oparciu o ramy analityczne Ruth Wodak i Martina Reisigla) wybranych tekstów i materiałów wizualnych z oficjalnej strony internetowej partii oraz kont jej czołowych członków na Twitterze, przeanalizowałam, jakimi środkami dyskursywnymi przedstawiciele partii kształtują obraz Polaków LGBT jako „Innych”, jak umieszczają homofobię w ramach szerszego populistycznego dyskursu i jak instrumentalizują ją dla uzyskania politycznych korzyści. Porównuję wyniki moich badań z wynikami analizy antymigracyjnego dyskursu Prawa i Sprawiedliwości przed wyborami parlamentarnymi w 2015 roku. Prace są prowadzone w ramach szerszego projektu na temat „inności” w ramach współczesnego prawicowego populizmu w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej.

Agendy partii politycznych i telewizyjnych serwisów informacyjnych w mediach społecznościowych w kampanii wyborczej do parlamentu w 2019 r.

Social Media Agendas of Political Parties Versus Social Media Agendas of TV News Services in the Parliamentary Election Campaign in 2019 The presented article concerns the convergence of symbolic political agendas of selected political entities (coalitions) (PiS-ZP, PO-KO) and agendas of selected broadcasters (Wiadomości TVP, Fakty TVN), in social media, in the parliamentary campaign in 2019. Theses concerning the overlapping of the media and political agendas of PiS-ZP and TVP and PO-KO and TVN in the thematic aspect were formulated, as well as the thesis about the affective orientation of media agendas towards specific political entities: TVN towards PiS-ZP and TVN towards PO-KO. The theoretical framework of the research was the agenda-setting theory, the concept of mediatization of politics and the evolution of the roles of political and media actors. The work also presents empirical research on the agendas of the above-mentioned entities on Twitter. The hypotheses were verified on the basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Polityka w cieniu koronawirusa

Politics in the Shadow of COVID-19: Parliamentary Election in the Kingdom of the Netherlands On March 15-17, 2021, the first parliamentary elections in the European Union during the pandemic took place in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The political authorities of the Kingdom of the Netherlands decided to hold the elections despite severe sanitary restrictions and curfew. On January 15, 2021, the outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, chairman of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), handed over the resignation of the entire government to the King. The immediate cause was the report of the parliamentary investigative commission announced in December 2020 on the extremely restrictive operation of local tax offices in connection with government child benefits. Mark Rutte has been running the country efficiently since 2010 and was also a favorite in the upcoming parliamentary elections. The elections were conducted without any disturbances. 37 parties were admitted to elections, the largest number in the post-war history of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The election winners were ruling party VVD party and progressive liberals from D’66. The discussion on the formation of the new government has already started and is accompanied by great emotions. It is going to be a long period of negotiations and their results are difficult to be predicted. The article presents the main actors of this parliamentary game.

Election delay will not solve Libya's problems

Significance This is expected to be followed by the first parliamentary election since 2014, at some point in early 2022. It now looks increasingly likely that both elections will be delayed. The electoral process lacks the elements it would need to be truly transformative, but it is prompting shifts in the political elite which will dictate developments for at least the next year. Impacts Khalifa Haftar will keep pushing for his armed group to form the core of Libya’s future army Seif al-Islam Qadhafi’s candidacy in the elections is unlikely to result in him becoming president. Aguileh Saleh looks set to stay on as House of Representatives speaker with no clear date for parliamentary elections.

The bioeconomy, carbon sinks, and depoliticization in Finnish forest politics

The forest bioeconomy in Finland has emerged as a project that seeks to resolve emergent contradictions in the capitalist ecological regime and to reconfigure spatial, temporal, and economic relations. The bioeconomy rose to public consciousness during the 2010s, especially after its adoption as one of the spearhead projects of the 2015–2019 center-right coalition government. The forest industry's bioeconomic plans are also an attempt to hegemonize and depoliticize a particular political view of forests in the era of climate change. In this paper, the politics of the bioeconomy and carbon sinks are scrutinized in the context of the 2019 parliamentary election season, during which forest use was a central political issue due to investments in new biorefineries. A data set of 80 newspaper articles is analyzed through critical discourse analysis. The analysis identifies three key discursive frames that legitimize the political imaginary of the bioeconomy: 1) rural reinvigoration and the defense of the nation's peripheries through spatial populism; 2) a view of forests as high-throughput carbon conveyors that conform to the temporalities of capital; 3) the establishment of the bioeconomy as a high-value accumulation regime that can resolve the profitability crisis of the paper and pulp production model.

Immigration and anti-immigrant voting in the 2017 German parliamentary election

We empirically examine the relationship between immigration and votes for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the 2017 German parliamentary election. We conduct a cross-sectional analysis, exploiting election results and socio-demographic as well as geographic features of the 401 German administrative districts. We find that immigration has a negative effect on AfD voting. A 1 percentage point increase in the share of foreigners is associated with a decrease in the AfD vote share of up to 0.37 percentage points. The result is robust to several estimation variations, such as addressing the potentially endogenous distribution of foreigners with an instrumental variable analysis.

Own-Party Bias: How Voters Evaluate Electoral Outcomes

A voluminous literature documents that citizens' perceptions of democracy are shaped by electoral victories and defeats, but what reasoning do citizens use to evaluate parties as winners or losers? Drawing on research on partisan-motivated reasoning, I propose an own-party bias in winner–loser evaluations according to which voters evaluate the electoral fate of their party more favourably than that of other parties. Data gathered in the aftermath of the Danish parliamentary election in 2015 support this expectation. Citizens are more inclined to interpret the election outcome as successful for their preferred party, regardless of the actual election result. This is more pronounced the stronger their partisan attachment and among the less politically knowledgeable, who also assign less importance to objective indicators of electoral success. The findings have implications for our understanding of electoral winners and losers and of how electoral results shape party support and polarization.

Voided Ballots in the 2012 Parliamentary Election in Serbia

The “white ballots” campaign in the 2012 parliamentary election in Serbia‎was accompanied by a change in the portion of invalid ballots, but also in‎their correlation with socio-demographic variables. When the percentage of‎invalid votes in the three previous elections is analyzed using the generalized‎least squares (GLS) multiple regression analysis, the percentage of inhabitants‎with incomplete primary education represents the best predictor. The percentage‎of individuals with primary education is also statistically relevant, just in‎the opposite (negative) direction, and less predictive. When GLS is applied to‎invalid votes in the 2012 election, incomplete primary education is positively,‎and primary education is negatively correlated with the criterion. The percentage‎of illiterates, the share of people over 65 years of age and the degree‎of urbanization are significantly, but negatively related to the criterion. The‎consequences of the 2012 election outcome were considered in the light of the‎regression to competitive authoritarianism.‎

Online Performance of Civic Participation: What Bot-like Activity in the Persian Language Twittersphere Reveals About Political Manipulation Mechanisms

In this paper, we reveal the understudied transnational dimensions of politically manipulative activity on social media. Specifically, we identify and investigate a bot-like Twitter network associated with the controversial organization of Iranian political exiles, the Mojaheddin-e Khalgh (MEK). Tracing and contextualizing the Twitter debate around women’s rights within the 2016 Iranian Parliamentary election, our analysis contributes to the scholarship on diaspora and digital media by drawing attention to the often-neglected potentials for non-state actors such as diaspora groups to make use of social media to promote political propaganda that advances militarist violence. We demonstrate how the MEK network’s “online performance of civic participation” is typical of a bot-net of weak influence inside Iran, but that the aims and extent of its influence can only be fully understood by situating it within a historical and transnational analysis of Iranian diasporic media and politics, one that takes complex US-Iran diplomacy dynamics into consideration.

INFLUENCE OF INTEREST GROUPS IN LATVIA ON CENTRALIZATION

Latvia has experienced four administrative-territorial reforms in 30 years. In 1989, local and regional elections were the first democratic elections in Latvia since 1934. From 1990 to 1992, self-governments were the main authority for re-establishing national independence and transforming the country from totalitarianism to democracy. The transformation process starts with wide decentralization, including substantial fiscal decentralization and substantial administrative decentralization. The first reform was the centralization (1994) of Rīga city government (1 self-government instead of a two-tier system, with 6 district local governments and 1 city local government). The second reform abolished elections in 26 regional councils (1998) and replaced them by delegates from local governments. The third reform (2009) was abolishing regional governments and reducing the number of local governments 5 times. The fourth reform will be implemented after June 5 2021, and its content is reduction of the number of municipalities 3 times. Therefore, from 596 local and regional governments in 1990s, Latvia will only have 42 local governments. All those reforms were directed towards centralization. Official goals of public administration reforms can differ from real intents of pressure groups, who impact ruling political parties and central government decisions. The paper aims to analyze reforms depending on pressure groups, who believe in benefits from centralization. Methods of policy analysis and grouping of statistics about administrative territories are used. They provided research shows that real goals of all four reforms were an expression of political competition. Dominating interest groups in each case have conflicting interests. Previous reforms facilitated emigration and peripheries effect, while the positive impact on regional development is not achieved. The impact of the last reform will largely depend on the results of the next parliamentary election of 2022.