Toothless opposition in Poland?

The aim of our chapter is to find out the ways in which opposition operates in the Polish parliament and to determine the underlying structural and functional, and contingent factors. In order to do this, we first explore the level of dissent of the Polish parliamentary opposition from the government policy proposals in the last three terms of Sejm (2005-07, 2007-11, 2011-15). The analysis will be based on a set of 1513 government bills, which corresponds to the 43 per cent of all the bills submitted in the period under investigation. Other indicators will help us to measure the opposition’s activity in the policy-making (e.g. introduction of bills, minority motions etc.) and scrutiny area (e.g. written questions). This ten-year period provides a sufficient amount of data to compare results in terms of structural characteristics of the whole opposition (i.e. its level of fragmentation and polarisation). We will also look for the determinants of the opposition’s behaviour among the characteristics of individual opposition parties (one party’s general approach to and capacity for government formation, inclination to represent rather than to provide a real alternative, ideological distance from the government position, relative size, and coalition potential). Our analysis will also take into account the content of the bills, which will permit us to determine the influence of particular issues on the opposition’s conduct. Among them, issues involving European Union membership may prove to be of great importance, as Poland is a big beneficiary of EU structural funds. Finally, independent variables will also include some external factors, such as time or critical events (economic crisis, Smolensk plane crash in 2010 with many MPs fatalities, party splits, changes in government).