Black Protests in Poland: The transformation of public outrage with unconventional political participation

Abstract

Democracy offers a determined set of conventional instruments of political mobilization focused on the electoral process, while unconventional political participation includes controversial measures associated with spontaneous conflict management. Demonstrations, protests, marches, and boycotts are the core of the democratic landscape, expressing political emotions, reducing social distress, and offering an additional platform to defend threatened civic rights or values. The emotional component and the regulative function differentiate unconventional political participation and conventional political campaigning. This chapter investigates the process of the Black Protests in Poland as a political and emotional response to a parliamentary initiative to restrict abortion laws. It discusses political and emotional motivations, and the ways in which they were regulated in spontaneous protest actions. It presents how the unconventional measures inspired conventional democratic actions, including party politics, political representation, and the formalization of the movement. The assessment of the emotional and regulative functions of the Black Protests is based on the data collected from social media platforms in 2016-2017, while the investigation of the influence on conventional politics is based on media discourse analysis, parliamentary debates, and political parties' official statements. The discursive approach to collected sources offers a perspective on the arousal of political emotions, their regulation through unconventional measures, and their adaptation within conventional party politics. It also helps to understand how the anger and fear expressed during the Black Protests reframed Polish political debate and influenced the electoral campaign in 2019.