Radoslaw Markowski

• Professor of Political Science
• Research Director at SWPS University

Some defenders of democratic rights and the rule of law are becoming increasingly frustrated by the European Union's inadequate response to democratic backsliding in countries like Poland and Hungary. This study focuses on Poland and introduces the concept of ‘Eurodisappointment’ to describe this new group, which is conceptually and empirically dis...

In this article, a modest attempt is undertaken to connect the rational choice theory mechanism with the sociological theory of voting, as efforts to juxtapose both theories are still rare, although some cited accomplishments offer interesting insights. Our dependent variable is participation in a local election in Poland. The local government elec...

The article is written in the form of an essay (for Dahrendorf Symposium), speculative in essence, yet based on the new selected evidence concerning peoples’ opinions and attitudes disclosed during the pandemic. It starts with remarks about predictions in social sciences and the complex problems in studying the shocks created by the Covid-19 pandem...

During the long nineteenth century, Poland was divided among the Russian, Habsburg, and Prussian empires. The partition produced regional diversity in political culture and in institutional and economic development. We examine how the cultural legacies of the empires have influenced the propensity of Poles to cast a ballot in parliamentary election...

The 2019 parliamentary election in Poland resulted in continuity of the incumbent PiS party-coalition. The election saw, for Poland, an unprecedented turnout of 62%. The 44% support for PiS translated into a 51% majority in the Lower House. The ability of the three opposition blocs (KO, SLD and PSL) to coordinate their political campaign for the up...

The article deals with the issue of a sense of political agency in the context of Polish local elections. It discusses the phenomenon itself and attempts to explain its determinants and relationships with electoral participation. The issue is studied in two institutional contexts: single-mandate constituencies and proportional representation consti...

While the Polish party system has shown signs of consolidation and stabilization in recent years, it is still susceptible to the emergence of new parties that seek to exploit untended ideological niches. However, these fringe parties consistently fail to establish themselves as permanent inhabitants of these niches or to consolidate their initial e...

While the global economic crisis brought no decrease in support of democracy in Poland, its effects turned out to be delayed and indirect. In the pre-crisis survey, a great difference in normative visions of democracy between citizens and MPs, especially concerning economic welfare, has been recorded. Citizens expressed a preference for more redist...

Since the 2015 elections, Poland has ‘enjoyed’ the attention of social sciences—political science in particular—to an extent greater than at any time since the period of “Solidarity” in the early 1980s. In contrast to that period, Poland’s idiosyncratic development over the last two and a half years can hardly be said to play the function of a norm...

Niniejszy rozdział poświęcony jest stabilności politycznej polskiej demokracji, ujmowanej z perspektywy postaw i zachowań wyborców. Teoria polityki bardzo silnie podkreśla wagę stabilności, a co za tym idzie, przewidywalność polityki. Staramy się zatem opisać ważne cechy demokracji i demokratycznego obywatela z punktu widzenia właśnie owej stabilno...

W niniejszym rozdziale analizie poddamy trwałość stosunku elektoratów poszczególnych partii do wybranych kwestii publicznych. W klasycznych ujęciach wyborów w demokracji, pozycje ideologiczne partii stanowią podstawę do ich oceny przez wyborców, którzy kierują się bliskością między własnymi preferencjami a przekazem różnych ugrupowań (Downs 1957; K...

The aim of the chapter is to analyse the electoral fate of new parties established during the elections to the European Parliament. The analyses cover the 1999 through 2009 elections and distinguishes between party systems of the stable and fragile European democracies. A set of sociological and political factors are accounted for as potential dete...

The main aim of this article is to consider the question of whether, in the years preceding the 2015 elections, significant changes had occurred in the consciousness of Poles in regard to democracy as a political order or in their appraisal of democracy's functioning. The article also presents a new manner of defining democratic legitimation. The q...

This article addresses the important yet neglected issue of whether the Polish party system has become more structured and consolidated. After twenty-five years of democracy, it would be reasonable to expect such an outcome. To answer the question, we based our analysis on the classic socio-political-cleavage theory of Lipset and Rokkan and the wor...

The book is a study of the state of the Polish democracy and focuses on the years 2012 and 2013. It explores available documents and statistical data, offers a collection of experts' judgments, and analyses public opinion research. Ten domains of democracy are covered, some of them as fundamental as the rule of law, the political community or publi...

The conventional argument in studies of political knowledge among members of the general public is that greater interest and engagement in politics leads to a better grasp of the relevant facts. However, this may not always be the case: When the facts themselves become politicized, interest and engagement in politics may mean learning the facts not...

This article is a case study of a single election in a single country focusing on the economic theory of voting during the 2011 parliamentary election in Poland. These are very specific elections, first because of the context - global economic crisis, and second, because for the first time after collapse of communism the incumbent party retained po...

This chapter deals with the impact of citizenship attitudes on popular support for European integration, an issue that has been extensively investigated in previous research. The distinctiveness of the new analysis in this chapter is that it allows a comprehensive empirical testing of a wide set of theoretical claims advanced in the literature that...

One of the most interesting features of the 2003 Polish referendum on European Union (EU) membership was the strong link between voting behaviour in the 2003 referendum and voting behaviour in the 2001 Polish parliamentary election. In this article, we test two competing mechanisms that could account for this finding: a responsible party model, whe...

Poland's major post-Communist party, the SLD, was an electorally successful legacy party during the 1990's. An analysis of Polish National Election Studies data and data from a separate study of new firm creation in Poland indicates their success was built on two important and related factors. One is the growth of new firms, which stimulated the gr...

It was only in 1989 with the recovery of full sovereignty and independence that Poland was able to relaunch its European aspirations. From the beginning two strategic goals were pursued — and ultimately achieved. Poland was different from most other countries in that joining NATO was much more of a strategic priority than EU membership. Entering th...

The Polish election of 2001 marked the reconstruction of the Polish right in parliament, the exit of the former governing parties and the entry of four new parties into parliament including, for the first time, some openly Eurosceptic parties. There is some debate among academics and journalists about the character of these new parties, but these v...

All of the Central and Eastern European countries making the transition to a market democracy have developed liberal constituencies and parties, albeit of various sizes and influence. Notably in some important cases it is the former Communist parties that have become both electorally successful and relatively more liberal. This paper uses a macro-l...

The article tests the commonly accepted political science wisdom about the effects of institutional design, namely, that presidential systems and/or parliamentary ones elected under the electoral rules of plurality/majority singlemember districts (SMDs) contribute to the accountability of a democratic system, while those under parliamentary proport...

We analyze the results of Poland's historic June, 2003 referendum on whether or not to join the European Union. We find that demographic factors did not play a particularly large role in determining vote choice in the referendum. As alternatives, we propose economic, political, and party based hypotheses, and find empirical support for all three. W...

So, does turnout matter? It is a much neglected question. Too often it is assumed, without much reflection, that turnout does matter. Low turnout erodes the legitimacy of the regime, it leads to class-biased or otherwise unrepresentative government and it is 'bad for democracy', we are told. And even when the question is addressed - as a question -...

Public perceptions of corruption are significant for their political consequences. But they are conceptually and empirically distinct from corruption. First, because perceptions of corruption run far ahead of experience. Second, because different factors influence the one more than the other – indeed poverty and low education increase perceptions o...

Referendums ca be an effective device of popular control only if a broad issue of principle is at stake, if the people clearly understand the issue, if they have strong and enduring views about it, and if the options on the ballot correspond to those views. In the early 1990s, referendums on the 'civilizational choice' facing Eastern Europe might h...

No abstract available.

'Parallel' divisions of identity in Poland are a thing of the past – and perhaps the future – but not the present. Yet contemporary Poles are still politically divided by identities – albeit by 'nested' Polish/European identities rather than by 'parallel' ethnic identities. They are not divided between Polish and European identities, however, but b...

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

There are many plausible ways to depict and explain the electoral behavior of the contemporary homo políticas. The one offered here is a very simple, though — in my view — parsimonious one. The main theme discussed concerns the changes that took place over the last decade in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, determining two crucial aspec...

No abstract available.

Post-Communist Party Systems examines democratic party competition in four post-communist polities in the mid-1990s: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Legacies of pre-communist rule turn out to play as much a role in accounting for differences as the institutional differences incorporated in the new democratic rules of the game. Th...

This article analyzes the structuring of party systems of four East Central European countries. At the outset an assumption is proposed that the region is by no means homogeneous (as is often treated) but exhibits different levels of ideological articulation and party formation. First, we concentrate on the left-right ideological identities and its...