A New Populist Divide? Correspondences of Supply and Demand in the 2015 Polish Parliamentary Elections
A New Populist Divide? Correspondences of Supply and Demand in the 2015 Polish Parliamentary Elections
Author(s): Ben StanleySubject(s): Government/Political systems, Electoral systems, Political behavior, Politics and society, Crowd Psychology: Mass phenomena and political interactions, Sociology of Politics
Published by: SAGE Publications Ltd
Keywords: Populism; Poland; Voting behaviour; Ideology;
Summary/Abstract: This paper uses a new set of questions to analyse the impact of populist attitudes on party preferences and voting behaviour in the 2015 Polish parliamentary elections. At these elections, voters faced a choice between two broad blocs: parties that accepted the “liberal-orthodox” model of post-communist politics, and those that rejected this model and the political elites associated with its implementation. I find that there is a coherent set of populist attitudes among the Polish electorate, and that it correlates with economic and cultural attitudes in ways consistent with the supply-side divide between liberal and anti-liberal parties. Analysis of the individual and combined impact of these attitudes on voting behaviour reveals that populism plays a significant role both in structuring the sentiments of voters towards particular kinds of political parties and in determining how they cast their vote.
Journal: East European Politics and Societies
- Issue Year: 33/2019
- Issue No: 01
- Page Range: 17-43
- Page Count: 27
- Language: English
- Content File-PDF