Lip-Service Liberalism? Declared and Revealed Attitudes to Democracy in Poland

• In Event: Democratic Support: Misperceptions and Understanding of Democracy

Abstract

Since 2015, Poland has experienced significant democratic backsliding as a result of actions taken by the radical-right Law and Justice (PiS) government. Yet despite Poles’ high levels of declared support for liberal democracy, there has been limited opposition to repeated violations of liberal democratic norms and institutions, with pro-democratic protests proving ineffectual and movements for the defence of democracy failing to coalesce. If consolidation requires elites and publics alike to view democracy as ‘the only game in town’, this mass ambivalence puts into question the extent to which citizens of young democracies respect the rules of the game. Drawing on recent research into partisanship, polarisation and acceptance of democratic norm violations (Carey et al. 2020; Graham and Svolik 2020) and “democratic hypocrisy” (Simonovits, Mccoy, and Littvay 2022) in the US, and using a novel battery of questions from the first wave of a three-wave panel survey to be conducted before, during and after the October 2023 Polish parliamentary elections, this paper will address the question of whether the muted response to backsliding in Poland is the product of a particularly acute bout of partisanship and affective polarisation, or of a more general and potentially chronic tolerance for undemocratic practices among Poles that runs contrary to declared preferences for liberal democracy.

Author

• Ben Stanley, SWPS University