Protesting Parties in Poland, 2020. Temporal Analysis of Coalitional Protests

In my presentation I will investigate the participation of political parties in social protests in Poland throughout 2020, a year marked by significant socio-political polarization and mass mobilization. The study challenges the differentiation hypothesis demonstrating that social movement parties in Eastern Europe also perform specialized functions during protests despite of greater involvement of parliamentary political parties and opposition parties. Visibility emerges as a critical strategic goal for parties, influencing their decisions to join high-profile protest events but social movement parties are pivotal in mediating between street protests and parliamentary actions, often serving as initiators or consistent participants in protest campaigns.

To show social movement parties functions in protests I employ dynamic networks for incorporating time directly into the analysis. Bi-dynamic line-graph is an innovative way to visualize the evolution of actors’ participation in successive events. The main implication of this method is that all time steps corresponding to events, are, in fact, directly taken into account, and actions, linked together by the common participation of actors, are represented as a chain, in a sort of continuous social process. This will allow for a closer analysis of the strategic moments in which parties decide to join protest campaigns. The presentation will also provide an opportunity to discuss the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in studies on social movements.