The influence of corruption scandals on party system’s fluidity and electoral volatility in Poland

There is undoubtedly a correlation between the type of party system, electoral accountability, corruption and assigning responsibility. If the citizens of a democratic state are not capable of determining responsibility for a policy, they are also unable to use elections as a tool to enforce responsibility for the pursuit of that policy. When responsibility is not conclusive, politicians’ motivation to understand and fulfil the expectations of citizens also declines. Thus, conclusiveness of responsibility is an important condition for the exercise of electoral oversight by citizens. However it should be kept in mind that when there is significant volatility among both voters and political elites themselves, it is difficult to achieve effective accountability. In particular, frequent transfers of politicians and party name changes result in politicians responsible for bad governments successfully avoiding the punishment of not being re-elected. In the present paper we will focus on the influence of corruption scandals on both party system’s fluidity and electoral volatility. Firstly, we are interested to know whether and how corruption affects MPs’ behavior. We hypothesize that once a case of corruption is detected, MPs will be more prone to change their party affiliation in order to avoid punishment for illegal party performance. Secondly, we will analyze the impact of corruption on the performance of electoral punishment mechanism. We expect that corruption scandals that a party is involved in will lead to decrease of electoral support for the party and increase of electoral volatility. We will test our hypotheses using official parliamentary data about MPs’ volatility, as well as the data from Polish National Election Study (years 1997-2015) which enable the analysis voters’ volatility in all elections held under democratic regime. Information about the extent to which corruption allegations and scandals have occurred is gathered from campaign coverage from selected media. The paper contributes to the theme of the panel as it seeks the general explanation of the influence of corruption on voters’ behavior. It also enables to go beyond simple punishment-reward mechanism, as it includes effect of the phenomenon on MPs’ inter-party volatility . We believe that understanding elites’ and voters’ corruption driven behavior, will provide better understanding of the functioning of post-communist democracies, such as Poland.