Elites vs the people: populism in the political thought of Law and Justice

Streszczenie w języku polskim

The purpose of this paper was to specify what is the share of narrowly understood micro-ideology in the political thought of Law and Justice. Embarking on the analysis of the above-stated problem, we first and foremost fixed particular methodological assumption. As a point of departure for our analysis we adopted the conception of the ideological morphology by Michael Freeden. In line with it, we assumed that ideologies are not fully distinct entities but they interact with one another. They are also partly overlapping and thus they share some contiguous points. 

In accordance with the concept of populism, as worked out within our framework, we focused our attention on the problematics of elites and the people. As conceived of by Law and Justice, elites did not discharge their duties, alienating themselves from the society and caring mainly about their own socio-economic interest. Furthermore, the critique of elites was mainly related to their non-democratic genesis and artificially created putative “super-expertise”.

Eventually, we proved that populism may be regarded as one of the phenomena characterizing the political thought of Law and Justice.