Party Organisation of PiS in Poland: Between Electoral Rhetoric and Absolutist Practice

The article analyses the organisation of the Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [PiS]) in Poland. The case of PiS does not only allow us to explore the organisational features of a strongly institutionalized, incumbent party which uses populist radical right (PRR) politics. PiS, we argue, is also an ideal case to contrast what such parties might rhetorically declare and substantively do about their organisational features. Using party documents, press reports, quantitative data, and insights from the secondary literature based on interviews with activists, we evaluate the extent to which PiS has developed a mass-party-related organisation, and centralized its intra-party decision-making procedures. We find that while PiS made overtures to some aspects of mass-party-like organisation for electoral mobilization, the party remained reluctant to actively expand its membership numbers and put little effort into fostering the integration and social rootedness of its members through everyday intra-party activities. Furthermore, despite attempts to enact organisational reinvigoration, in practice PiS continued to revolve around strongly centralized structures and, in particular, the absolutist leadership style of the party’s long-time Chair Jarosław Kaczyński. The analysis contributes to assessing the variety and functions of organisational features and appeals within the comparative study of PRR parties. Most particularly, it invites further research into the still relatively under-researched interactions between PRR party organisation and active party communication.

Parliamentary Mandate Fulfilment. An automated approach to measuring congruence between the pre and post-electoral discourse of parties using word embeddings

The idea that electoral competition, party promises and manifestos are important for how the representative behaviour of parties unfolds post-electorally is central to democratic theories of representation. Scholars of Party Mandate fulfilment have for long been focusing methodologically on the number of pre-electoral pledges parties in government manage to realize. This paper analyses existing research and its limitations and proposes a novel approach for mandate fulfilment, extending past research (both conceptually and methodologically) by looking at the extent to which the parliamentary discourse of parties matches their electoral discourse. It designs, tentatively validates and implements a novel measure of how similar is the pre and post-electoral rhetoric of parties by utilizing recent advances in computational linguistics and the diffusion of text analysis tools in the social sciences. It applies it on the Irish parliament and compares electoral manifesto data with post-electoral parliamentary data from 1997 to 2019.

The politicization of protected areas establishment in Canada

Environmental issues and related policy instruments are becoming increasingly politicized in the Canadian context, but it is unclear whether biodiversity conservation and protected areas are similarly politicized. Here, we suggest that the political characteristics of protected areas do not lend themselves easily to politicization, but data from the Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database indicate that at the federal level, and provincially in Alberta, the rate of protected areas establishment is becoming increasingly tied to electoral politics, suggesting some politicization. We situate these trends within federal electoral politics between 2006 and the present, outlining the differing approaches of the Harper Conservatives and the Trudeau Liberals and showing how both administrations instrumentalized the environment and protected areas for their own electoral benefits. We find similar trends in Alberta with the Progressive Conservative, New Democratic Party, and United Conservative Party governments. However, while there is increasing polarization in practice, there has been less polarization of the electoral rhetoric surrounding protected areas. This politicization represents a barrier to conservation in Canada as it can lead to greenwashing, poor accountability, or the creation of an anti-conservation constituency. At the same time, politicization can raise the profile of conservation in public discourse, leading to greater public interest and engagement.

Introduction to the special issue: Elections, rhetoric and American foreign policy in the age of Donald Trump

This introduction presents the special issue’s conceptual and empirical starting points and situates the special issue’s intended contributions. It does so by reviewing extant scholarship on electoral rhetoric and foreign policy and by teasing out several possible linkages between elections, rhetoric and foreign policy. It also discusses how each contribution to the special issue seeks to illuminate causal mechanisms at work in these linkages. Finally, it posits that these linkages are crucial to examining the changes brought about by Trump’s election and his foreign policy rhetoric.

‘We need to talk’: Trump’s electoral rhetoric and the role of transatlantic dialogues

Trump’s stinging electoral rhetoric regarding Europe has profoundly challenged the foundations of the transatlantic relations. Exploring the link between electoral rhetoric and US foreign policy, this article focusses on a key feature of transatlantic policy-making, that is, the multi-levelled architecture of European Union (EU)–US dialogues, involving diplomats, legislators, and civil society. While research shows that dialogues help promote cooperation, their relevance and specific functions in times of elections have not been explored so far. To what extent do dialogical interactions change at the approach of elections and right afterwards? Why do dialogues keep going, in spite of fierce presidential rhetoric suggesting otherwise? To fill this gap, this article explores the EU–US dialogues following Trump’s election to determine the extent to which these dialogues endorse new functions that have so far been overlooked. Adopting a socio-psychological approach, it shows that one of the functions that dialogue fulfils in times of elections is the reassurance that the relationship identity of the actors will be respected to meet their ontological security needs. Drawing on interviews and official documents, this article sheds a new light on the importance of dialogical engagement at these critical points in the life of liberal democracies.