Democratic backsliding and the shifting dynamics of empowerment: The case of the All-Poland Women's Strike

Abstract

Examining the trajectory of the All-Poland Women's Strike (Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet, OSK), this article explains how collective trauma stemming from gendered democratic backsliding transformed into political empowerment and its subsequent decline. Employing an integrated theoretical framework that combines feminist empowerment theory and resource mobilization theory and utilizing protest event data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), the study traces the movement's dynamics from October 2020 to December 2023. The results reveal two distinct phases: an initial surge of mass mobilization, characterized by large-scale collective and psychological empowerment, and a subsequent protracted phase of disempowerment. The decline in the OSK's capacity for sustained action is correlated with escalating state repression, which systematically depleted the movement's human, material, social-organizational, and moral resources. This resource erosion progressively undermined participants' psychological agency and constricted the movement's strategic choices. The study concludes that the gendered dynamics of democratic backsliding paradoxically function as both a catalyst for initial mobilization, by intensifying grievances, and an impediment to sustained resistance, by systematically dismantling the essential conditions for collective action and eroding the psychological resilience and agency of participants. Democratic backsliding constitutes an adaptive assault on the social and psychological infrastructure of civic action, systematically narrowing political opportunities and uncovering the inherent precarity of sustained resistance in increasingly authoritarian environments.