Agnieszka Kwiatkowska
academic webpage
Research projects
Current projects
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DEMRES. The Effectiveness of Discursive Strategies of Democratic Backsliding and Democratic Resilience (2025-2030)
Position: Principal Investigator
Funding: National Science Centre
Threats to the stability of democracy in Europe manifest themselves through various discursive strategies employed by political actors, which underpin institutional and political changes, aim to justify anti-democratic actions, and shape citizens’ electoral behavior. The main objective of the project is to identify and analyze the key narratives of democratic backsliding and democratic resilience used by anti-democratic and pro-democratic parties, as well as to assess the responsiveness of key target groups to these narratives and their mobilizing potential in elections. The project aims at creating a unique knowledge base on how populist challenges reshape contemporary democracies. It employs a multi-stage, sequential mixed-methods research design that integrates qualitative and quantitative approaches across four distinct phases: advanced analysis of political texts, in-depth interviews with political experts, a survey with experiments, and focus group interviews. The results of the project will expand the current state of knowledge in the areas of research on democracy, political parties and movements, public discourse, and political communication.
Past projects
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Discursive strategies of democratic backsliding and democratic resilience in Europe (2023–2024)
Position: Jean Monnet Fellowship
Funding: Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute
De-democratization, autocratization or the illiberal turn has been taking place in Europe throughout recent years. The aim of this research is to identify and analyze the most prominent frames of democracy used by the governing right-wing populist parties and main anti-populist opposition parties in Europe.
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Position: Principal Investigator
Funding: National Science Centre
The research objective is an analysis of institutionalization of political parties since the democratic transition in five Central European countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Slovakia and Hungary) as reflected in parliamentary discourse and voting. The goal will be accomplished using a set of data mining methods of analysis of textual (parliamentary debates) and numerical (roll-call voting) data on an innovative database which will be created in the project. We will analyse in particular:
- How and by which parties new political issues were introduced to public discourse?
- How the semantic content of individual issues, their context and salience changed in the parliamentary debates?
- What is the relationship between the level of cohesiveness in parliamentary speeches regarding key political issues and party capability of influencing the behaviours of other political parties?
- What are relationships between: party cohesion in debates, unity in legislative voting and party splits?
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Stereotypes or Ballot Placement? Women in the 2023 Parliamentary Elections – A Survey Experiment (2023-2024)
Position: Principal Investigator
Funding: SWPS University
The 15 October 2023 parliamentary elections constitute a critical juncture for Polish democracy. A record turnout of 74 per cent and more than eleven million votes cast for the democratic opposition parties gave them a decisive advantage in both chambers of the parliament. This victory would not have been possible without the unprecedented mobilisation of young people, particularly young women. Drawing on an analysis of survey data, we address the following questions:
- What gender stereotypes hinder women’s participation in politics?
- What factors increase or decrease the likelihood of voting for female candidates?
- What are the prevailing social attitudes towards women in politics and gender equality?
- How are electoral strategies and voting behaviours changing, and to what extent are they shaped by gender and by issues related to women’s rights?
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ULTRAGEN. Becoming an adult in times of ultra-uncertainty: intergenerational theory of 'shaky' transitions (2021-2025)
Position: Researcher
Funding: SWPS University
Treating the global polycrisis as a backdrop for studying social change, the ULTRAGEN project wants to find out what are the long-term effects of social crises on the transitions-to-adulthood and intergenerational solidarity in contemporary Poland. In the ULTRAGEN project, we show that disruptive socio-historical circumstances lead to ‘shaky’ processes of reaching adulthood, which are marked by alternating accelerations and regressions.
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Position: Principal Investigator
Funding: National Science Centre
Roll calls are widely used as a source of data for quantitative analyses, especially for US and Latin American legislators (Carey 2007, Morgenstern 2004) and Western Europe (Rosenthal, Voeten 2004, Hug 2006, 2010), but data collections from Central and Eastern Europe are incomplete and inaccurate. As a result, there are no comparative analyses between countries, and it is virtually impossible to generalize the results of research on Central European parliaments. The goal of the project was to produce a comprehensive and up-to-date collection of individual voting results in selected Central European Parliaments (Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, Romania), enriched with parliamentary and legislative metadata. Using this unique data collection, the following research questions have been investigated:
- dimensions of party competition
- ideological cohesion of the parties
- transformation of inner-party ideological divisions into party splits or loss of members
- polarization of party systems
- relations between the government and the opposition
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Dimensions of Party Competition in Poland: Two Waves of CAWI Survey and a Corpus of Political Parties’ Tweets (2019)
Position: Principal Investigator
Funding: SWPS University
Basing on the theoretical foundation of issue yield theory (De Sio and Weber 2014; De Sio 2018), focusing on the herestethic use of policy issues as strategic resources in multidimensional party competition, we analyse party competition in Poland through an issue competition perspective. Following the Issue Competition Comparative Project (ICCP) methodology, we conducted two waves of a CAWI survey on a representative sample of Polish population before and after the 2019 parliamentary elections in conjunction with scraping political parties' posts from Twitter and merging it with data from the Manifesto Project.
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Political representation in the Parliament of the Republic of Poland during the term 2015-2019 (2017- )
Funding: SWPS University research fund
Position: Principal Investigator
Survey among 125 Polish MPs focusing on their values and preferences and their perception of an idea of representation.
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Polish people about Polish movies - Research study on opinions on Polish cinema and attitudes towards Polish movie productions (2019-2020)
Funding: National Film Archive - Audiovisual Institute, Polish Film Institute
Position: Coordinator of survey research
The study aimed at portreying of the Polish cinema audience: their aspirations and needs, emotions related to cinema, knowledge and behaviours. Secondly, we examined how, in the perception of Poles, Polish cinema presents men and women, society and family, social and professional groups.
Past projects
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Participation of women in public life (2019)
Funding: The Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights
Position: Coordinator & researcher
The aim of the study was to analyze the participation of women in the elections to the European Parliament and the national parliament in 2019. The report on the study was presented at the seminar organised by The Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights. -
Poles' attitudes to the European Union, democracy and the rule of law (2018-2019)
Funding: European Commission Representation in Poland
Position: Coordinator & researcher
The aim of the analyzes is to provide reliable, in-depth knowledge of Poles' awareness of the European Union in general and in relation to specific issues within the remit of the EU, as well as phenomena inherent in EU membership - democracy and the rule of law.
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Women's rights to be elected and the anti-discrimination mechanisms (2018)
Funding: The Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights
Position: Coordinator & researcher
The aim of the project was to obtain in-depth knowledge on the impact of the quota mechanism introduced in 2011, introducing the amount of 35% for each gender on the election lists in all elections using proportional electoral system. The study was conducted on a representative quota-random sample (N = 10,521) at the turn of October and November 2018 (between the 1st and 2nd round of local elections). The report from the study, Women in elections and anti-discrimination mechanisms - the current state and forecasts for the future, presented on a conference Unfinished emancipation? 100 years of women's suffrage examines a number of issues relating to the differences observed in the political participation of women and men, including:
- Poles' beliefs about the reasons for the lower presence of women in politics
- Differences in political participation between women and men
- Awareness about the the quota system and public preferences towards modifications of this tool, i.e. what potential improvements to this project have a chance of gaining public support.
- Green Politics in Poland
My Ph.D. thesis was concerned with the process of the Polish Green Party institutionalisation and based on the research project I started as soon as the party emerged. I analysed their institutionalisation, internal divisions and conflicts, co-operation with other movements, their social base, allies and opponents as well as opportunities and obstacles of implementing their demands and achieving political success. The research methods included regular surveys at all official party congresses, interviews with key position holders, participatory observation, analysis of party documents, promotional materials and media coverage, and national and cross-national survey data analysis.
I am now extending my analyses to the Green voters in East and Central Europe, their preferences and possibilities of mobilisation to identify cultural, institutional and political obstacles for the Green Politics in East and Central Europe.
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Social Movements in Poland
Transition from communist systems to democracy has found new social movements (NSM) activists in a very difficult situation. Their pre-war organisational structures and networks were destroyed by the communist governments or infiltrated by the security services. The externally imposed authoritarian regimes had also caused a number of pathologies in public life: the lack of tradition of self-organising and the destruction of fundamental social bonds that form the basis of trust towards fellow citizens, resulting in mistrust and suspiciousness against any public activity and, therefore, low levels of social activism. My research in this area is focused on the environmental, feminist and LGBT movements, as well as contemporary social and political activism in Poland in general.
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State, Citizenship and Inequality
I am interested in the issue of political representation and inequality in possibilities of exercising individual’s citizenship rights and political impact. I analysed differences in citizenship knowledge and practices between men and women, their divergent ways of self-defining as members of a social and political community, and parties’ and voters’ preferences on gender of the candidates on electoral lists. I also conducted research on political preferences and voting behaviours, the impact of socio-political cleavages on the political competition, and analysed political elite formation in Poland. Currently I am researching the causes of differentiation in government responsiveness towards social movements’ claims.
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Political aspects of immigration and problems of translating political systems
I have recently started researching the impact of the process of migration on changes in political perception and behaviour of the immigrants from Central East European countries. Researching migrants gives an exceptional opportunity of discovering the process of adjustment of political orientations to the new system by adult, socialised individuals, and assessing which of their components remain invariant and are carried over to the new situation, and which are replaced by local equivalents. I am interested both in how they translate political preferences and ways of understanding political events across different political systems and spaces of political competition, and, what kind of differences exists in conceptualisation of belonging and citizenship between home country and state of residence; which parts of citizen identification and practices are exclusive and which exists in both countries.
Parliamentary elites
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Parliamentary speeches
Parliamentary debates are a very multifaceted source of information, in comparison with other methods of determining party positioning, like roll-call data analysis (especially when party discipline is enforced), party programs (in which the organisation is trying to present one, coherent approach, strategically imposed by a party elite, rather than a variety of ideological options existing within a party), or expert evaluations (in which experts are asked to provide an ideal point of a party position instead of a range). Therefore, they allow for the broader comparison of inter-party and intra-party conflicts and dimensions of competition and their change in time.
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Polish National Election Study PNES)
The Polish National Election Study (PNES) survey began in 1997 and has been carried out after each of the five subsequent elections. Each PNES survey incorporates the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) core module, providing political scientists with a rich set of data on the mode and quality of political representation and accountability, the extent and durability of political cleavages, citizens’ normative visions of and evaluations of democracy, the positions of citizens on key political issues and their broad ideological leanings, retrospective and prospective evaluations of the economic situation, party identification and political preferences, socio-demographic characteristics, and the relationship between all the aforementioned factors and the key dependent variables of electoral participation and vote choice.
‘Political representation in the Parliament of the Republic of Poland during the term 2015-2019’. Survey among MPs focusing on their ideological position and their perception of an idea of representation