Favoring Democracy, Voting for Authoritarians: The Polish Electorate Since 2015

• In Event: Accountability in Hybrid and Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Since coming to power in 2015, Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party has been engaged in a systematic effort to bypass, erode and, where possible, disable the institutions of liberal democracy altogether. But it has not paid a political price for doing so in the eyes of public opinion: its support level in the opinion polls has remained stable at around 40% of those intending to vote, and it was able to win re-election in 2019 with a 43.6% vote share. How can this be squared with the fact that Polish survey respondents’ declared support for democracy remains very high (at over 80% on the standard “democracy better than any other system” question), stable over time (both before and after 2015), and not much different from levels seen in countries that have *not* experienced backsliding. Using individual-level data from successive waves of the Polish National Election Survey, this paper will consider several possible explanations for this puzzle, ranging from mobilization effects (i.e. the drifting into and out of the active electorate of voters with different levels of commitment to democracy), social desirability bias (i.e. the tendency to offer pro-democratic responses to survey questions regardless of one's partisanship or vote intention), as well as differences in the meanings attached to the concept of democracy itself by different partisan electorates.

Author

• Hubert Tworzecki, Emory University