Polarization and the political agenda: income inequalities in political parties’ manifestos in Poland

ABSTRACT

The paper approaches the topic of economic inequality in a political discourse in Poland. It is based on a content analysis of 43 political manifestos from the elections held in Poland between 2001 and 2011. The analysis confirms that growing economic polarization of Polish society was rarely challenged during the democratic transition in the crucial party documents. The longitudinal approach allows for capturing the differences in the way inequality are referred to in the political before and throughout the economic crisis ignited in 2008, showing and that, with the exception of one political party, the issue of income inequality was still absent from the political agenda at times when it was one of the crucial topic in political debates elsewhere. Contrary to most studies on political manifestos which apply a quantitative approach, this paper offers qualitative content analysis concentrated on one important political theme.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequality
• political discourse
• party manifestos
• Poland
• party politics
• Polish politics

Acknowledgements

I would like to express special thanks to Magdalena Rek-Woźniak, my wife, best friend and colleague, for insightful comments on earlier version of an article. I am also grateful to James Hartzell for proofreading of the article and two anonymous reviewers for Contemporary Politics whose comments improved the paper’s quality. I also wish to express my gratitude to the staff of the Archive of Political Parties at the Institute for Political Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences for their support and providing early access to the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Wojciech Wozniak holds a Ph.D. in sociology and works at the Faculty of Economics and Sociology University of Lodz, Poland. His research interests concern political discourse, social inequalities and sociology of sport. He has authored or co-authored three books and more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. He chairs a Sociology of Sport Section in Polish Sociological Association. His most recent book titled: Politics, Ideology and Football Fandom: The Transformation of Modern Poland (co-authored by Radosław Kossakowski and Przemysław Nosal) is forthcoming with Routledge.

ORCID

Wojciech Wozniak http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9720-6595

Notes

1 The only result concerning the inequality, that could be drawn from application of the method approaches the presence of social justice in the manifestos (Cześnik, 2011, pp. 16–17). It was one of four coding categories present in the manifestos of all the four largest political parties. However, it could be defined as an important theme only in the documents of the Polish People’s Party. It seems that in the case of Polish political scene, studying the party manifestos without paying attention to the contextual background and political actions distorts their analysis.

2 The preliminary analysis of manifestos was conducted using data gathered from the Archives of Political Parties, from the Institute for Political Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences, and published in: Słodkowska, 2002; Słodkowska & Dołbakowska, 2006, 2007, 2011, 2012, for a broader elaboration on a specificity of Polish party manifestos see: Woźniak, 2017. For the purpose of analysis in NVivo 8 software, the digital versions of the manifestos were downloaded from the website of Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/). As the page numbering is usually missing in these documents, the references in the paper are made to the collections edited by Słodkowska and Dołbakowska.

3 The political manifestos of the Polish parties Self – Defence and League of Polish Families did not contain any information which could be perceived as important with respect to the perception of inequalities by the political parties. While briefly mentioned in the programme of the former, these references were part of very general statements referring to the generally disadvantageous situation of Polish citizens.

4 Praise for the Nordic countries does not meant that the social-democratic way of approaching social problems is announced in the document. To the contrary, the section about social policy promises further expansion of means-tested measures in place of universalistic solutions in social policy.