A qualitative approach prevails in the project. The hypothesis generating case study of Poland (Lijphart 1971) will be a general method. Detecting trends of democratisation and autocratisation at different territorial levels in Europe will require collection and integration of primary datasets such as V-Dem and the Democracy Barometer on the EU-27 as well as World Bank, Policy IV, Freedom House, EIU Democracy Index, Quality of Government and Regional Authority Index.
For analysing links between territorial dimension and democratisation/autocratisation in Poland the following sources will be collected
- legal acts on the territorial structures and documents on legislative process;
- local media materials;
- data from in-depth semi-structured interviews of sub-national politicians and national experts;
- data from focus group interviews – local journalists and NGOs members;
- data from mini survey – several questions added to the CBOS omnibus study;
The following methods will be used within the analysis
- Content analysis (with a use of MAXQDA software) – to find out if we can observe at subnational levels any non-democratic legislation and practices and to investigate the local and regional groups’ perception of the state of democracy in their cities or regions;
- Process-tracing of the paths through which the national level affects the subnational structures – to investigate the causal chains leading to democratic or autocratic changes.