The Changing Landscape of Civil Society in Poland: Preventing “Eliticization” or Creating a New Elite?

The presentation examines recent developments in Polish civil society, focusing on institutional changes introduced in a top-down fashion by the Law and Justice government. Based on available quantitative data, qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with civil society actors, I will analyze the logic behind those changes in the light of elite theory. The elites are usually defined as groups having disproportionate: 1) access to resources, 2) power to influence political decisions and 3) impact on the public debate (e.g. Best and Higley 2018). The main goals of the 2017 reform of civil society’s organizational structure and financing, as stated in the Law and Justice electoral program and key programmatic documents, were to strengthen Polish civil society and prevent its “eliticization” by promoting public debate, re-directing public funds and opening up possibilities for citizen’s engagement in public consultations and cooperation with state institutions. Thus, my main question concerns the effects of the reform introduced by the government: do they meet the stated aims? I would argue that the institutional, financial and discursive changes concerning Polish civil society, which were introduced since 2015 are in practice oriented toward completing democratization process by establishing a new social hierarchy and creating a new elite. Instead of preventing further stratification among civil society actors and strengthening democracy, the changes so fur led to further pillarization of Polish civil society (Ekiert 2019) and to the emergence of a new elite consisting mostly of organizations loyal to the ruling party (Bill 2020, Kulas and Śpiewak 2020). The Polish case confirms the view that while right-wing populism is often defined as a fiercely anti-elitist stance, in practice right-wing populist actors usually oppose elite pluralism rather than implement a more egalitarian structure of power: they invest in the formation of their own elite and oppose all groups which they perceive as a potential counter-elites (Mangset et al 2019).