Nationalism and political competition in Central Europe: The case of Poland

Abstract

To explain nationalist politics in Poland, researchers and observers have sometimes speculated about the dispositions of the electorate, popular sentiments, public fears for the loss of sovereignty, the people's historically ingrained preference for nationalist rhetoric, and their feelings of discontent about the economy. This article argues that hypotheses about the existence of nationalist sentiments within the electorate have tended to eclipse an important question about the main producers of nationalist rhetoric: Why do certain mainstream parties at certain points in time decide to frame their program as nationalist, even when there is no objective reality that seems conducive to the creation of great public concern about typically nationalist issues? This article explores this question by looking at various campaigns for Polish parliamentary elections since 1997. My argument is that when seeking to explain the motivations behind major campaign turns toward nationalism we should not merely understand them as responses to voter sentiment and voting behavior. Instead, we should see them as crucially driven by the transactional logic of inter-party competition in a party system that is in constant flux.