Mass Polarization, Crumbling Institutional Trust and Democracy Eroding in Poland

• In Event: Central and Eastern Europe Twenty Years after EU Enlargement

Abstract

The democratic backsliding literature sees reactionary ideological shifts as a reason for the success of right-wing populism (RWP)—shifts that supposedly have fueled citizens' distrust in democratic institutions and their readiness to support RWP in its efforts to cut back on democracy's liberal principles. However, the assumptions underlying this 'standard narrative' of RWP's rise are more often stated than tested. Filling this void, we analyze data from the ESS and EVS/WVS in a longitudinal design in Poland at two distant time points over the past 20 years of membership in the European Union. We test whether the Polish public experienced polarizing ideological shifts on four key value dimensions (right-vs-left on economic issues, nativism-vs-cosmopolitanism on immigration issues, patriarchy-vs-emancipation on sexual matters, economy-vs-environment on sustainability issues) to the effect that those segments at the reactionary end of these cleavages lost trust in European and national institutions in ways that make them ready to sacrifice democracy's liberal principles. Our results provide no consistent confirmation that polarizing ideological shifts in the general population account for RWP's electoral rise. We conclude that the problems explaining RWP originate in democracies' institutional arrangements, namely representation deficits of growing non-voter camps and the rise of social media, which gave these non-voters a voice by disrupting established gate-keeping channels into European and national politics.

Authors

• Agnieszka Turska-Kawa, University of Silesia in Katowice

• Christian Welzel, Leuphana University