Social movements and political opportunities: a comparative study of 2016 and 2020 women’s protests in Poland

Abstract

This thesis aims to study the role of interplay between structural (objective) and perceived (subjective) political opportunities in the mobilisation and policy outcomes of the women’s mass protests in Poland between the years of 2016 and 2021. The research primarily focuses on perceived opportunities and their role in the protest mobilisation and outcomes. However, it also maps out structural opportunities as they are closely connected to each other, and perceived opportunities cannot be fully understood without referring to the structural ones. The study employs a comparative case study design and explores the social phenomena of women’s mass mobilisation in Poland between 2016-2021 using interpretive content analysis and visual thematic analysis methods. To answer the abovementioned research question, this thesis argues that the structural opportunities are filtered through agents’ perceptions, which in turn, contributes to the differences in organization and outcomes of social movements. Therefore, the differences in mobilisation and policy outcomes between the “Black Protests” in 2016 and “Women Strike” in 2020 can, in part, be attributed to the mismatch between the structural and perceived political opportunities in Poland between those years. Theoretically, this thesis is situated within social movement literature, more specifically within the framework of objective and perceived opportunities, where it adds to the existing knowledge on the interplay between those two dimensions of the concept. Empirically, the study adds to the existing literature on women’s mass mobilisation in Poland and contributes to the comparative studies between the two waves of protests (2016-2018 and 2020-2021). The research is socially relevant, since the issue is recent and increasingly important in Poland, attracting a lot of attention from public as well as from the elites and academia.