Polish Right-Wing Populism in the Era of Social Media

Special Issue: Mapping the Discursive Opportunities for Radical-Right Populist Politics across Eastern Europe

“…The present special issue contains six articles that map out these developments across Eastern Europe, covering both individual country cases such as Romania (Soare and Tufiș 2018), Slovenia (Pajnik 2018), Estonia (Kasekamp, Madisson, and Wierenga 2018), Slovakia (Kluknavská and Hruška 2018), and Poland (Lipiński and Stępińska 2018), as well as comparing two neighboring countries in which radical-right populism registered dramatically different trajectories, namely Hungary and Romania (Szabó, Norocel, and Bene 2018). These articles also take different methodological approaches to examine favorable or disadvantageous discursive conditions for radical-right populist politics.…”

“…These articles also take different methodological approaches to examine favorable or disadvantageous discursive conditions for radical-right populist politics. They employ both established and novel means to study radicalization, such as thematic social media analysis (Kasekamp, Madisson, and Wierenga 2018), framing analysis (Kluknavská and Hruška 2018), qualitative content analysis (Soare and Tufiș 2018), mixed-methods (Lipiński and Stępińska 2018), and social network analysis (Szabó, Norocel, and Bene 2018).…”

“…Last but not least, the sixth article of the special issue returns to some key contextual factors that explain the electoral success of radical-right populism, by concentrating on the rise in Poland of the political forces led by Paweł Kukiz and Janusz Korwin-Mikke (Lipiński and Stępińska 2018). The article evidences the importance of such social and political factors as (a) the widespread usage of social media; and (b) the gradual radicalization of the mainstream agenda, which normalized and legitimized anti-elitist claims in the public eye, providing resonant political opportunity structures.…”

The Right-Wing Perspective: Populist Frames and Agenda on Facebook in Central and Eastern Europe

“…This includes written social media contents of various RWP actors as a contemporary arena of discourses. Similar studies have examined shorter periods with broad topic modelling approaches on European and US far-right networks (Schroeder, 2019), mapped the main topics addressed by specific parties and movements on Facebook (Stier et al, 2017), examined alternative or right-wing news media (Boberg et al, 2020) or specific politicians (Berti, 2020;Lipiński & Stępińska, 2018). More constrained and western international contexts have been examined (Klein & Muis, 2018), as well as the RWP party agenda on Facebook during the European Elections (Heft et al, 2022), far right networks (Caiani et al, 2012) and topic-based networks (Ahmed et al, 2020).…”