Radoslaw Markowski

The polish elections of 2005: Pure chaos or a restructuring of the party system?

Since its democratic inception in the early 1990s, the Polish party system has justified the reservation expressed a decade ago by Peter Mair that ‘the very notion of a newly emerging party system may well be a contradiction in terms’ (1997: 175, emphasis in original). Poland has always been the best example of the problem. Following the 2005 parliamentary election, this has become an even bigger issue than before. To illustrate, let us start with a short history of Polish democratic party competition. Poland’s first fully democratic parliamentary election did not take place until 1991, when almost a pure PR system was applied: no entry thresholds, the application of Saint Langue system for transferring votes into seats, and fairly large electoral districts contributed to a highly fragmented party system. Most party system indicators are presented in Table 1. The major change in electoral rules was introduced in the 1993 election, establishing 5% and 8% thresholds for parties and coalitions respectively, plus a National List – 69 seats in a second tier were allotted to parties that cleared a 7% national support hurdle. An increase in the number of electoral districts from 37 to 52 and a consequent decrease in their magnitude (plus inaugurating the d’Hondt formula), paved the way to even greater disproportionality and made it harder for small parties to get into the parliament and win a significant number of seats. The next parliamentary election (in 1997) was run with exactly the same electoral rules. In the 2001 election there was another change in the rules which stimulated greater proportionality – a decrease in the number of districts to 41 and the ending of the National List, plus the application of the Sainte Langue system. In 2005 the only change was a reintroduction of the d’Hondt formula.

The 2007 Polish Parliamentary Election: Some Structuring, Still a Lot of Chaos 1

The parliamentary election of 21 October 2007 was an early election, held two years ahead of schedule. The two years between the autumn of 2005 and the decision in July 2007 by Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS) to break up the coalition with two populist and xenophobic allies – the Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland (Samoobrona Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, or SRP) and the League of Polish Families (Liga Polskich Rodzin, or LPR), was by far the most turbulent period of Polish party politics, both between the incumbents and opposition and within the coalition. In fact, fierce conflicts were the trademark of this ‘coalition’. Polish electoral history was presented in the September 2006 volume of West European Politics (see Markowski 2006), and at this point let us just reiterate that the 2007 parliamentary election was run – just as the previous 2005 one had been – under the PR system with ‘open lists’, votes transferred into seats by the d’Hondt formula, in 41 districts, and established in 1993 thresholds of 5 and 8 per cent for parties and coalitions, respectively.

Understanding Dual Identities in Poland

‘Parallel’ divisions of identity in Poland are a thing of the past – and perhaps the future – but not the present. Yet contemporary Poles are still politically divided by identities – albeit by ‘nested’ Polish/European identities rather than by ‘parallel’ ethnic identities. They are not divided between Polish and European identities, however, but between exclusive and dual identities – in essence a division between parochial and cosmopolitan identities. Contrary to fears that Europeanism in Poland especially might be narrow, culturally restrictive, or even racist, our data show that dual identities reflect broader cosmopolitan perspectives as well as specifically European or Western sympathies. There is a real significant difference of values between exclusive and dual identifiers which extends well beyond attitudes to Europe – and far beyond attitudes to the EU in particular. To a considerable degree this is a difference – some have argued a conflict – between traditional and modern Poland, between secular and devout Poland, between educated and ignorant Poland, between young and old Poland, and between hopeful and fearful Poland.

Euroscepticism and the Emergence of Political Parties in Poland

One of the most interesting features of the 2003 Polish referendum on European Union (EU) membership was the strong link between voting behaviour in the 2003 referendum and voting behaviour in the 2001 Polish parliamentary election. In this article, we test two competing mechanisms that could account for this finding: a responsible party model, whereby citizens’ attitudes towards EU membership would have been driven by their preferred party’s position on the issue, and a more Downsian model, whereby the existence of an unrepresented Polish Eurosceptic electorate could have driven the success of two new Eurosceptic parties in the 2001 parliamentary elections. Drawing upon data from the 1997, 2001 and 2005 Polish National Election Studies, we find much stronger empirical support for the Downsian approach. Far from being led to their Euroscepticism by party leaders as the 2003 referendum on Polish EU membership approached, voters for Poland’s Eurosceptic parties in 2001 already possessed healthy degrees of Euroscepticism, especially when compared to supporters of other parties and even to non-voters.

The new Polish ‘right’?

The Polish election of 2001 marked the reconstruction of the Polish right in parliament, the exit of the former governing parties and the entry of four new parties into parliament including, for the first time, some openly Eurosceptic parties. There is some debate among academics and journalists about the character of these new parties, but these views do not always reflect the attitudes of the Polish people themselves towards the new parties: how they placed them on a left–right scale, and how far they sympathized with them – even if they did not actually vote for them. Although some academic commentators have argued that Europe was not an important issue in that election, in fact the ‘most important’ issues had little impact on sympathies for either old or new parties, while Europe had a strong impact – yet for essentially pragmatic rather than cultural or nationalist reasons.

The Polish parliamentary election of 2015: a free and fair election that results in unfair political consequences

The Polish 2015 parliamentary election resulted in victory for a single party, Law and Justice (PiS).1 For the first time in the history of democratic Poland, the victor was able to create a government without having to negotiate with coalition partners. This was due not so much to significant switches in the preferences of voters, but rather the result of a very high number of wasted votes (more than 16% of active voters) due to thresholds for parties (5%) and party coalitions (8%). As a consequence, Gallagher’s disproportionality index surged to 11% (see Table 2). In three of the seven previous parliamentary elections, the victorious party attracted a higher percentage of active voters than that achieved by PiS in 2015 (37.6%), but was unable to form a single-party government (Markowski Cześnik and Kotnarowski 2015: 19–23). The senior coalition partner in the 2011–2015 Civic Platform (PO) government lost a significant share of the vote, but if the newly established party Nowoczesna (Modern) is considered to be a direct heir of the liberal policy platform proposed by the early (i.e. 2001) PO, then the centre-liberal camp together obtained 32% of the vote. It should be borne in mind as well that the 2015 PiS party list also contained candidates from two other parties, Polska Razem (PR) and Solidarna Polska (SP), and was in point of fact a three-party coalition. Two additional phenomena are worth mentioning: the absence of parties of the left in the new parliament, and the poor result of the Polish Peasant Party (PSL), the only Polish political party that has survived under the same name and leadership since 1989. The poor result of the agrarian PSL in the countryside, among peasants and farmers has undoubtedly made a significant contribution to PiS’s strong showing.

EU Membership and the Polish Party System

It was only in 1989 with the recovery of full sovereignty and independence that Poland was able to relaunch its European aspirations. From the beginning two strategic goals were pursued — and ultimately achieved. Poland was different from most other countries in that joining NATO was much more of a strategic priority than EU membership. Entering the EU was a challenge that emerged in the mid-1990s, and in some ways interrupted the multiple process of political and economic transformation that characterized the process of post-communist transformation. It represented a new demanding task that could not be avoided, although this may seem a strange view of the beneficial act of joining a union of countries that has been in existence for several decades. The reason for such a deterministic view lies in the relative backwardness of Poland and the CEE countries as well as their geopolitical, and rather insecure, location. If one applies the two broad categories of fate and choice to this context, for most CEE countries EU accession fell far more into the category of fate rather than choice. This had particular implications for its impact on Poland’s party system.

Knowledge and Partisan Bias An Uneasy Relationship

The conventional argument in studies of political knowledge among members of the general public is that greater interest and engagement in politics leads to a better grasp of the relevant facts. However, this may not always be the case: When the facts themselves become politicized, interest and engagement in politics may mean learning the facts not as they are, but as competing partisan and media elites want them to be. In this article, based on the 2010 Polish National Election Survey, we investigate the following questions: Does partisanship boost incorrect perceptions of contested facts when the correct answer is unfavorable to the respondent’s preferred party? Does partisan/ideological selectivity in exposure to media outlets do likewise? Are stronger partisans more likely to be misinformed about politically contested facts even if they are knowledgeable about the uncontested ones?

Political Institutions and Electoral Behavior in Central and Eastern Europe

There are many plausible ways to depict and explain the electoral behavior of the contemporary homo politicas. The one offered here is a very simple, though — in my view — parsimonious one. The main theme discussed concerns the changes that took place over the last decade in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, determining two crucial aspects of the phenomenon: electoral participation and political choice.

The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe. Public Preferences and Policy Reforms

During the last two decades the effectiveness and democratic quality of policy making in multi-level systems have occupied a prominent position on the agenda of the scholarly and political debates, and in most Western countries a profound restructuring of regional and local government has taken place. These debates and reforms are focussed on ‘a better fit between the scale of problems confronted by governments and the scale of government institutions that are responsible for solving those problems’ – as Harald Baldersheim and Lawrence E. Rose phrase it (p. 1) in their edited volume. The core questions of this book are (see p.2): ‘What are the strategies chosen to achieve a better fit between the scale of governance and the scale of problems in the field of local and regional government in European countries. What are the conflicts accompanying the choice of strategies? And what are the factors that shape choices of strategies and outcomes of those strategies in different countries?’ To answer these questions Baldersheim and Rose develop an analytical framework combining an institutional and actor-oriented analysis. They start from institutional contexts as points of departure and the basis of possible veto alliances but argue that it is crucial how actors are framing and choosing particular reform strategies. Both the institutional context and the framing and choice of a reform strategy impact on pattern of conflicts through which reform outcomes are determined. Based on this analytical framework, Baldersheim and Rose develop convincing propositions on strategies, conflicts and reform outcomes. In the concluding chapter Baldersheim and Rose reflect on the reform processes and outcomes outlined in country chapters on the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Greece, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK. They do it in a comparative way by using the analytical framework and considering the propositions developed in the introduction. Their comparative analysis yields convincing results with regard to the interplay between the key components of their analytical framework. This applies in particular to the developed typology of outcomes of different reform initiatives and how these outcomes are explained. Although Baldersheim and Rose have based their comparative reflections on the country chapters included in the book, almost all country chapters do not use the analytical framework explicitly to structure their analysis. This is a typical weakness of edited volumes. Furthermore, it can be argued that some of the country chapters would have had no chance to be published separately in a reviewed international journal. This is another typical weakness of edited volumes which has not been avoided in this book. Yet this book is without any doubt highly recommended for readers interested in the ongoing restructuring of regional and local government due to the outstanding introduction and conclusion written by the editors.