Kitsch in Politics: Managing a Political Community with Kitschy Games

The chapter describes the sources, human motivations, and institutional mechanisms of transformation from democratic parliamentary action to parliamentary kitschy experience. Starting with the sources of political action derived from the pluralist theory of politics, the author shows how political parliaments work from the viewpoint of the politicians themselves. Political systems are viewed as complex and multi-dimensional organisations that focus attention of communities and provide spaces for adequate decision-making, oftentimes bending toward political game arenas. This happens whenever politicians instrumentally treat uncertainty about the goals and conditions of political life. The author concludes that the situation in parliament can be so complex that political actions transcend the uncertainty about goals and conditions of political action so that they are treated as manufactured, faked, or artificial. This provides a fertile ground for a kitschy experience. The method utilised in the chapter includes secondary data analysis of interviews that had been conducted with members of parliaments in one of the European liberal democracies—Polish Sejm. Originally interrogated about the political games in parliament, parliamentarians pointed to the structural and personal sources of kitschy experiences in politics. Based on this, a critical account of the opinions based on the theory of aesthetic situation is conducted.