The polish elections of 2005: Pure chaos or a restructuring of the party system?

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See note 5 below. 2. The other coalition partner, the Labour Union (UP), was a marginal party with negligible support of about 2–3%. 3. For readers less familiar with Polish affairs, let me recall that in fact Poland proved extremely successful during this period. Poland's economy was the first to come through the ‘valley of tears’ and already in 1992 registered a 2.5% growth in GDP, which continued the highest in the region at 6–7% GDP annual growth in the mid-1990s; inflation was brought under full control; state reserves were excellent, unemployment slightly above 10%. The central statistical office showed that by the end of the 1990s household wealth had increased rapidly, consumer optimism had gone up, associated for instance with the overall highest proportion of the public being ‘satisfied with the way democracy works in Poland’ (different surveys show about 60% (+/−5) always expressing a positive evaluation of the democratic performance. Democracy in Poland has also been considered by external monitoring agencies (Freedom House and the like) as ‘fully consolidated’ or ‘almost consolidated’. 4. A reminder might help at this point. In the 2001 election completely new competitors were Civic Platform (PO), Law and Justice (PiS), League of Polish Families (LPR), and new formally, i.e. Self-defence (SRP) and Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) which only in this election were running as party entities. 5. The Polish NES tradition combines accomplishment of a classical socio-political research of the mass public preferences, elite (MPs) survey, party manifesto analysis and macro-ecological (geographical, cultural and economic) determinants of the vote. The 2005 edition has been designed as a panel study. The results quoted above come from its first wave (N = 2404 respondents). 6. In this section most of the data and the quoted results of my analyses, for the sake of space, are not shown, but only descriptively presented; data are however available upon request from the author. 7. The size of the circles/ellipses indicates the homo-/heterogeneity of the electorates (measured by standard deviation). The centres of these geometrical figures indicate their mean location on the two dimensions. The two dimensions are constructed on the basis of factor scores from factor analysis with varimax rotation. The questions/variables used in both elections for constructing the dimensions are the same. 8. The Polish NES question concerning party identification uses classical Michigan wording: ‘is there any party you feel close to?’ and if yes, ‘how close?’. 9. In Polish democratic politics it is a common rule that the two main coalition partners divide between them the posts of premier and lower house speaker.