Embedded in scholarship on militant democracy, this research aims to explain how Italian legislation was positioned to militant democratic measures and how this changed over time. Drawing on the qualitative source analysis and the explanatory frameworks of democratic vulnerability tests two competing theory-grounded assumptions. While the first one assumes that Italian democracy became vulnerable when traditional militant democracy instruments were outmoded, the second considers the misuse or abandonment of those means with social consent as the source of vulnerability. The crisis-induced socioeconomic inequality and uncertainty weakened the Italian political nation. As a result, the latter supported populists in return for a promise of political change. The anti-democratic legal means employed to extend power competencies and prevent the exchange of ruling parties were the way to and the costs of the expected political change. At the same time, the political nation became unable to self-organize to strengthen democracy self-defense. As a result, Italians co-produced a quasi-militant democracy that turned vulnerable because militant democracy measures were misused or not used with the consent of Italians that relinquished their political subjectivity in favor of the Northern League and the Five Star Movement.

The article analyses political opposition toward the date of presidential elections and conducting them in the correspondence form on May 10, 2020, in Poland. The study is embedded in the theories of quasi-militant democracy and the emergence of social movements. The method used in the study is the qualitative analysis of media messages of the main news websites in Poland. Mainly in terms of the activity and arguments of citizens against the elections in the form of correspondence. The presidential elections revealed the imperious relationship between the government and citizens in Poland’s becoming quasimilitant democracy. The emphasis was on the elements regarding the organisation of elections on May 10 that could impact a social movement’s emergence. The most significant role in stopping the May 10 elections was played by institutional opposition in the form of local self-governments’ civil disobedience and the Senate’s action, which efficiently blocked the party’s initiative. The article accounts for how election matters determined the social mobilisation and activity of the new social movement. This paper’s main finding is that institutional opposition may prevail over the social one in the pandemic.

Informed by a research problem of explaining the relationships between the specificity of civic education and public support for authoritarian politicians, this paper aims to propose and test an analytical tool for measuring media engagement in civic education. It contributes methodologically to studies on civic education by delivering a tool that applies to identify and trace state media’s efforts to shape either democratic or autocratic citizenship models. Thereby, it allows monitoring current challenges to civic education for democracy in individual countries. The test contributes empirically to the studies on state-orchestrated civic education by revealing civic education for autocracy in pandemic-driven Poland. It enriches the knowledge of the use of Polish state media by the anti-democratic ruling actors to maintain the status quo.

To what extent do current models apply to analyze soft repression? Research on soft repression is still under development, and due to technological advancement, it is necessary to analyze different types of soft repression in a way to modify and refine existing typologies. Drawing on lessons learnt from Asian and regional studies, this article aims to discuss critically selected theoretical tools used to study soft repression. It scrutinizes four models that apply to delve analytically into different types of soft repression. The focus is on the most influential approaches in recent years that gained the highest impact on the development of studies on contentious politics. The first typology applies to differentiate between soft repression forms used mainly by non-state actors. The second approach treats soft repression as an explaining variable, as the text focuses on the consequences of soft repression. The third model applies to studying hard and soft repression during protests. Its analysis exposes how the combination of effectively selected forms of repression leads to the demobilization of individual movements and discourages participation in the protest. The last model involves a specific form of soft repression that uses relationships and interpersonal ties to demobilize protesters.

The COVID-19 caused a global crisis of an unprecedented scale. In order to contain the spread of the virus, governments took instant measures, adopting new legal regulations which included restrictions and limitations in the sphere of constitutional rights and freedoms. The aim of the paper is to discuss protesters’ actions and their different forms, and to analyse the response of law enforcement officers who secured demonstrations. I undertook to find the answers to two fundamental research questions: What action did protesters take during the pandemic in Lithuania? What was the character and intensity of the surveillance, intimidation and presence of the police during demonstrations? The research covers the period from 11 March 2020, when the World Health Organization declared the pandemic, to the autumn of 2021, when anti-vaccine protests took place in Lithuania. In the study, I applied the institutional and legal analysis, as well as the qualitative source analysis.

New social movements, focused around values and sociocultural identities, shape new communities outside the traditional field of party politics. On one hand, in their institutionalization, social movements enter the political sphere, and on the other, political parties strive to attract voters and supporters by application of tools typical for social movements. The subject of this paper is the border area between new social movements and parties, understood primarily as modes of collective action. The study aims at delineating the field of their mutual influence and at identifying its mechanisms, and explores the problems of ambivalence and instability affecting the dynamics of change within political systems.