The Rise of Poland’s PiS: Organizational Expansion Through Civil Society Activism

• In Event: Nationalism, Authoritarianism, and Parties

Abstract

Immediately after the right-wing Law and Justice [Prawo i Sprawiedliwość - PiS] came to power in Poland in 2015, it embarked on an aggressive agenda of illiberal political and institutional transformation, unleashing a polarized political conflict that seems to be creating a two-party system dominated by PiS and its main opponent, Civic Platform [Platforma Obywatelska - PO] (Markowski 2016, Tworzecki 2019). At the same time, this political conflict also appears to have accelerated the insertion of national parties into local politics, which in Poland has until lately been dominated by independent politicians and non-partisan lists (Gendźwiłł 2020). Our contribution aims to understand this double expansion of PiS - horizontal, encompassing a growing share of the national electorate and vertical, establishing presence in a greater number of local territorial units - by highlighting the role of local civil society in party building efforts by PiS.

We hypothesize that alliances with ideologically proximate local civil society organizations and their incorporation into local chapters is helping expand the party’s official presence at the local level and thus increase its vote share. We focus our analysis of local civil society on the Gazeta Polska Clubs, a national network of local right-wing organizations that have become linked to PiS prior to 2015, i.e. when it was in the opposition. We base our analysis on interviews we conducted in 2018-19 with local PiS activists and office holders in several municipalities, as well as data on local election results and the establishment and closure of Clubs across Poland's municipalities (gmina) since 2005.

To test our hypothesis concerning the effect of establishing local party presence in municipalities on PiS’ electoral success, we use the methodology employed by Samuels and Zucco (2014) in their study of the Brazilian Worker’s Party (PT): a difference-in-differences model estimating the future electoral benefit for the party of presenting a candidate (and, in our case, party list) for local office. To test our second hypothesis about the role of local civil society in party building, we adapt the same methodology to analyze whether the Clubs contributed to PiS’ ability to present local lists in a greater number of municipalities. Using the difference-in-differences approach, we analyze whether there is a systematic relationship between the existence of a Gazeta Polska Club and PiS' ability to present a party list in a municipality where it previously did not have a party list. To adjudicate whether the existence of the clubs provides an organizational boost above and beyond incumbency, we analyze the role of the clubs in the organizational expansion of PiS both before and after 2015, when it came to power, and compare PiS' organizational expansion at the local level since 2015 to that of PO during its years in power (2007-2015).

Our paper engages with issues both around party building and around autocratization by shedding light on how a party with a clearly illiberal ideology has succeeded in expanding its organization and voter base. Highlighting the role of local civil society organizations as co-agents, together with PiS politicians, of this success, we point out that the rise of a popular illiberal party not only reflects the entrepreneurship or opportunism of politicians, but also the efforts of wider social groups who are organized in political communities around ideological goals and shared meanings.

Authors

• Melis G. Laebens, Nuffield College

• Marcin Ślarzyński, Polish Academy of Sciences