Roads to and from Democracy

About the author

The Authors
Krzysztof Jasiewicz is the William P. Ames Professor in Sociology and Anthropology at Washington and Lee University and the Editor of East European Politics and Societies.   He received his education at the University of Warsaw and the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research has focused on political attitudes and behavior in Poland.

About the book

This volume is a collection of papers written over the course of forty years. It examines political attitudes, patterns of political behavior, and institutional framework of transition to democracy in Poland. Its contents have been shaped by and provide commentary on the often-dramatic political developments in Poland: the emergence of the massive liberation movement “Solidarity” in 1980–81; the dissent against the communist regime in the 1980s; the struggles to pave the roads toward consolidated democracy in the 1990s; and the problems with adaptation to European liberal values in the 21st century that led to democratic backsliding. In conclusion, it presents the cultural and structural background of the cleavage between the proponents of open society and its enemies.

With advent of democracy in 1989, Krzysztof Jasiewicz deployed his formidable skills as a behavioural social scientist to analyse voting behaviour in Poland. Over the last thirty years, he authored a series of incisive articles for understanding the development of the party system and electoral outcomes in Poland. To have them all in one volume arranged thematically, provides a comprehensive and indispensable account of electoral politics in both the eras of democratization and democratic backsliding. It is a must read for students of post-communist politics, voting behaviour in new democracies, and regime change.

Michael Bernhard

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Introduction

Once, a leader in anti-communist opposition. Then, a leader in post-communist transitions. Now, a leader in democratic backsliding. This is the shortest version of the history of Poland over the past forty-fifty years. In the 1980s, and earlier, in the 1970s, the people of Poland – intellectuals, students, workers, farmers – resisted the authoritarian communist regime with a force and determination unseen elsewhere in the Soviet Bloc. In the words of an American historian, “To write about opposition to communism in the 1980s, one must begin with Poland […] there were far more people in Poland than elsewhere with experience in independent political activism – perhaps by a factor of 100” (Kenney 2002: 15).

The Polish not-quite-fully-democratic election of June 4, 1989, overshadowed by the Tiananmen Massacre the same day on the one hand, and the telegenic fall of the Berlin Wall a few months later, was in fact the real beginning of the end of the Soviet Bloc, the launcher of the domino effect that swept through the East-Central Europe in 1989 to reach the Soviet Union itself two years later. Following the election, the people of Poland gave their consent to the austerity associated with economic reforms known as the Balcerowicz Plan or Shock Therapy. Their suffering paid off – Poland became the first post-communist nation to reverse the economic decline associated with the transition from a command to a market economy. Poland withstood the challenges of the Great Recession (2008–09) – the only country in Europe to do so – and recorded a steady economic growth until the global recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This growth was facilitated by the consolidation of liberal democracy, with the rule of law, pluralist party system, and a plethora of independent media outlets.

Yet political liberties, and, more generally, the freedom of choice may generate divergent outcomes. In democracies, the governments are accountable to citizens, who penalize unpopular rulers in an election by casting their votes for the opposition, which, in turn, becomes the subject of voters’ scrutiny in the next election. And so goes the electoral cycle – for as long as no winning party undermines the rules of the democratic game. It is a bitter historical irony that now, over thirty years after the fall of communism, one can see, in both the policies of the Polish government and in the public discourse, the designs and the language Poles once faced from their communist oppressors. The political cleavage dividing Poland today is a reflection of the conflict between those who desire liberties for themselves and for all – and those who reject this vision and prefer their version of escape from freedom.

The choices made by the people of Poland made in the course of the past few decades have been the subject of intellectual reflection and of numerous empirical studies. This volume is a collection of commentaries written by the author as the developments unfolded. The commentaries, with just a few exceptions, were based on analyses of empirical data gathered in surveys of political attitudes, especially post-election surveys of voting behavior, as well as other types of public opinion polls. Most papers were originally written in English, a few were translated from Polish. All but two have been previously published in English.

All articles have been intended for an audience broader than just the social scientists or, in general, scholars. Therefore, regardless of their reliance on empirical data, they tend to not follow the typical pattern of research papers, with extensive literature review and testing of theory-driven hypotheses. But they are not simple research reports either. They are indeed commentaries and analyses of historical developments in the context of popular attitudes. Empirical data are presented in a fashion that allows their digesting and interpretation by a reader without specialist training in statistics. The reader has therefore an opportunity to assess and question, and subsequently accept or reject, author’s conclusions. Only a few chapters (7, 8, 9, 15, 17, and 19) took a form of essays or opinion writing, but they as well are solidly anchored in empirical observations.

Arguably, the main function of social sciences is demystification of social reality. A case can be made that at least some analyses presented here contradicted conventional wisdom or exposed bias in politically motivated interpretations of social phenomena. Such interpretations abound in turbulent times. The articles gathered here were published over the course of forty years (from 1983 to 2022); the cited data come from the period from 1980 to 2019. This was indeed a turbulent time in Polish history. It seems appropriate then to present here the context of the first publication of each chapter. They all appear here in their original form, without any redactions and only with line-editing limited to elimination of typographical errors. The sole exception is Chapter 2, where two sections of the original were deleted as only remotely related to the theme of the book and based on data virtually impossible to digest by a contemporary reader (ecological analysis of the 1989 election results on the level of the forty-nine provinces that were abolished by the 1999 reform of country’s territorial division and administration). Heavier editing could allow for elimination of certain repetitions (sometimes there is an overlap in data analyzed in a couple of chapters, or in presentation of contextual matters and literature review), but on the expense of article’s integrity. After all, each was written as a self-contained statement. Furthermore, the absence of such editing removes a possible charge of doctoring the text, omitting or changing interpretations that did not stand the test of the time.

The book is composed of four parts. Part I, “Toward Democracy”, tells the story of the decay and collapse of the communist regime in Poland, as well as of the first experiences in electoral democracy (the 1989 and 1991 parliamentary and 1990 presidential elections), as viewed through the prism of changing political attitudes and behaviors. Chapter 1, “The Poles of ‘81: Public Opinion on the Eve of Martial Law” was originally written in Polish and published in the underground (samizdat) journal Krytyka (No. 13–14, 1982). At that time, the author was most fortunate to be a member of a research team at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Philosophy and Sociology (IFiS PAN) which, under the leadership of Władysław Adamski, conducted a series of surveys based on representative samples of Poland’s adult population that were aimed at the study of political attitudes, especially popular responses to historical events, from the emergence of the Solidarity movement, to its suppression under a martial law, to the eventual victory. These particular editions of the project have been known as “Polacy” (Poles), with the addition of the year of its field execution (Polacy ’80, ’81, ’84, ’88, ’90). The first, Polacy ’80, was conducted in the fall of 1980, a couple of months after the birth of Solidarity. The field work on the second one began in the last week of November 1981 – and was abruptly ended by the imposition of the martial law on December 13, 1981. Fortunately, 95 % of interviews had been by that time collected – just enough to constitute a basis for a reliable snapshot of the state of the mind of Poles on the eve of martial law.

The research report on this project was printed in one hundred copies only – and only to find its way to a shredding machine (or however the functionaries of the regime were getting rid of undesired publications at that time). However, each of the authors received a personal copy (maybe as an act of grace, but more likely in recognition that they knew the contents and possessed their manuscripts anyway). If it were an act of grace, this was also an act of carelessness, resulting in the publication of an extensive summary of the report in Krytyka. The undersigned was invited to write this summary by the Editor-in-Chief of Krytyka, Jan Kofman. The article received the byline of Jan Powiórski, a pseudonym chosen by the author to hide his identity not only from the agencies of the regime, but also from his colleagues in the research team. A venture into the samizdat publishing by one member of the team could put in jeopardy his co-authors as well. If investigated, they could honestly deny any knowledge on the authorship of the samizdat publication. Besides, such were the practices of underground publishing those days: one would share personal information only on the need-to-know basis.

To the author’s surprise, a friend showed him a year or so later a copy of Poland Watch (No. 3/1983), a journal published in the United States by a group of Polish émigrés and their American friends, with the translation of this article by Maya Latynski (who herself learnt the identity of the author only years later).