Abstract
Party system in post-communist Poland was born in 1989, and since then, it has evolved significantly. This chapter provides an analysis of how Polish political parties functioned after 2001, which is preceded by an adumbration of the system’s development before that date. It uses the concept of institutionalisation to determine why some formations failed while others survived and became permanent features in the partisan competition. It also employs the classic models of political parties so as to place the analysis in a well-known and understood conceptual framework. The final part of the chapter is devoted to identifying entry barriers that new entities face when attempting to break into the Polish political market.
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Notes
- 1.
Since the 2001 reform, the financial dependence of Polish parties on state subventions has almost no parallel in Europe (Casal Bértoa and Walecki 2018: 46).
- 2.
Due to formal discrepancies, in 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that the Modern was not eligible for a public subvention. Hence, the party needed to seek other sources of funding. However, many private donors considered its founder the main guarantor of its success. Therefore, upon his removal, they chose to withdraw their financial support.
- 3.
- 4.
They examined parties included in the Political Party Database (PPDB). See also https://www.politicalpartydb.org.
- 5.
See https://wspieraj.nowoczesna.org (accessed on 31 January 2020). The financial report for 2018 indicates that the party was funded solely from membership fees and private donations (Nowoczesna 2019).
- 6.
In another part of this book, the readers will find our analysis of what do party elites and members think about membership, as well as their roles and functions in the organisation (see Chapter 6).
- 7.
This sentence is a quotation from Władysław Bartoszewski (former Minister of Foreign Affairs) and can be found on the party’s website, as an opening to the ‘about us’ section. https://platforma.org/o-nas (accessed on 31 January 2020).
- 8.
The pyramid is structured as follows: The top tier is made up of parties in the government, the middle tier is parties represented in the parliament, and the bottom tier consists of parties present at the electoral level on the ground and those that are not represented at a national level.
- 9.
There are 41 constituencies for parliamentary elections in Poland, which means that registering a nationwide list requires collecting signatures from at least 21 constituencies.
- 10.
There were 30 committees formed by parties, one coalition committee and 57 non-partisan committees.
- 11.
PiS’ strategy for the 2015 and 2019 elections envisioned a tri-partisan coalition under the name of the United Right and a pragmatic approach, i.e. registration of a single, PiS candidate list, with other coalition members granted a certain share of slots. Had the two smaller coalition members registered their own lists, they would have probably failed to reach the threshold, and the bloc’s overall number of mandates would have been lower. Although PiS enjoyed solid support among voters on its own, this move allowed the party and its partners to maximise their gains and, therefore, their ability to govern.
- 12.
Calculated through the following equation for the ‘effective number of electoral parties’ index: y = –1,0122x + 11009, R² = 0,6035.
- 13.
More about parties’ relations with the media can be found in Chapter 7.
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Jacuński, M., Brodzińska-Mirowska, B., Pacześniak, A., Wincławska, M. (2021). The Emergence of the Party System in Poland—From Instability to Permanent Rivalry Patterns. In: Party Organization and Communication in Poland. Political Campaigning and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59993-5_3
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