Political representation, salience and consolidation of democracy in Poland

This paper deals with research into the quality of democracy and political representation and intends to make a contribution to the research on the representation of citizens’ preferences in Eastern Europe. The attention is focused on the level of congruence in a period of transition (1997–2015) in Poland. The intent is to demonstrate that political representation, understood as congruence of preferences on issues, is present and improves in Poland from 1997 to 2015 regardless of the level of party institutionalization. Second, differences in congruence are accounted for. The increased salience of an issue makes political parties crowd to represent the majority preference. On less salient issues political party representatives hold to their ideological preferences. For comparison purposes congruence is operationalized as a ‘one to many linkage’ and is measured in accord with the measurements of Kitschelt et al. (1999) of absolute and relative representation. The hypotheses are tested using data from 1997 and 2015 in Poland. The data allows for measuring policy preference on a range of issues in economic, social, cultural, and foreign policy domains. The measures of congruence are unique in recording the preferences of a sample of citizens (before elections) and a sample of representatives after elections. For citizens, the analysis was conducted at the level of individuals and party-supporter groups, while for the MPs, it was conducted at the level of political party groups. The findings have implications for the study of how salience affects political representation and contribute to the understanding of the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe.