Podział lewica–prawica w perspektywie konstruktywistycznej
The left-right split in the constructivist perspective

Summary/Abstract: The case of Poland perfectly illustrates the scale of discrepancies between researchers who, on the one hand, criticize the specific nature of the Polish version of the left-right split, but on the other emphasize its important role in the process of identifying political and social actors and the ability of dichotomy to organize political life. Political actors define themselves in a specific way, allowing voters to recognize these acts of self-positioning and rely on them to make electoral decisions. The purpose of this paper is to problematize these divergences in two ways. First, by showing that the origin of this ‘problem’ lies in the assumptions underlying the theory of rational choice. It is claimed that it is the positivist ontology and epistemology underlying the paradigm of rational choice that produced ‘the problem’, which – from the perspective of interpretative approaches – constitutes an inherent part of political life. Secondly, by applying the assumptions of constructivism to the study of the left-right division in order to investigate the role of dichotomy in the political communication processes and construction of political order.

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