Solidarism, Liberalism and Populism: voting behaviour in the 2015 Polish Parliamentary Elections

The result of the Polish parliamentary elections of 2015 has led to a renewed interest in the politics of populism. These elections were a success for two parties opposed to the institutions and political elites of Poland’s Third Republic: Law and Justice and the Kukiz ’15 movement. At the same time, while supply-side volatility has increased, the Polish party system still contains several parties which are opposed to a wholesale change of political system. At present, this fundamental distinction is the most salient line of difference at the level of elite politics. The distinction between pro-system and anti-system parties in liberal-democratic political systems is often explained in terms of a divide between parties of the establishment elite and populist challengers. Yet while numerous studies explore the supply-side differences between populist and non-populist parties, little work has been done to examine whether such a divide reflects or is driven by demand-side preferences. To address this gap in the literature, this paper offers a demand-side analysis of the purported ‘populist divide’ in Poland. First, it seeks to answer the question of whether there such a thing as a populist voter: whether we can clearly differentiate between those who hold populist views, and those who do not. Second, it asks whether populist attitudes help to explain party preferences and voting behaviour when controlling for established socio-structural and ideological predictors. To explore these questions, this paper uses a set of original survey questions taken from the 2015 Polish National Election Survey dataset. These items measure the stances of respondents on four key indicators of populist attitudes, developed on the basis of the ‘thin ideological’ definition of populism set out in Stanley (2008).