Polish Democracy: From Consolidation to Backsliding and Beyond

Abstract

This panel introduces the Oxford Handbook of Polish Politics (Oxford University Press), a comprehensive 56-chapter volume published in December 2025. As the EU’s fifth largest member and sixth biggest economy, Poland offers crucial insights into democratic transition, consolidation, and the contemporary challenge of democratic backsliding. The Handbook traces this journey from the Solidarity movement’s triumph over communism through NATO and EU accession, to recent challenges to judicial independence and media freedom, and the mobilisation efforts that brought pro-democratic parties back to power. This path illustrates broader theoretical questions about institutional design, party system development, political culture, and the relationship between economic success and democratic stability. Handbook and panel, with further authors in attendance, examine institutions, mass politics, party systems, society, governance, EU integration, and foreign policy. Panellists will present findings that challenge conventional wisdom about democratic consolidation and focus on Poland’s unique features including its weakly institutionalised party system, semi-presidential regime, entrepreneurial political parties, and the paradox of Eurosceptic elites governing a predominantly Euroenthusiastic public. Poland’s case speaks to urgent contemporary concerns. Despite maintaining the highest GDP growth in the region from 1989-2015, economic success did not prevent populist mobilisation driven by demands for more redistributive policies. The country’s experience with judicial reforms, media capture, and civil society restrictions offers comparative lessons for other democracies facing similar pressures. Simultaneously, Poland’s response to these challenges and its recent electoral dynamics provide insights into mechanisms of democratic defence and renewal. Panellists will explore key themes from the Handbook, as historical legacies and political culture, how communist-era experiences and weak civic traditions continue shaping contemporary politics, from party system instability to patterns of social solidarity; institutional design and democratic quality, the role of semi-presidentialism, electoral systems, and constitutional arrangements in facilitating or constraining democratic backsliding; party politics and electoral dynamics, the consequences of entrepreneurial, weakly-rooted parties for democratic governance and the patterns of inter-party competition that enable political volatility; Poland in Europe, the tension between elite-level Euroscepticism and public Euroenthusiasm, and Poland’s evolving role from catalyst for integration to regional leadership through illiberal alliances and back again. Each presentation will situate Polish developments within broader comparative frameworks, making the panel relevant to scholars of democratisation, Central and Eastern, and more broadly, European politics, party systems, and institutional design across regional contexts.

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