Welfare and chauvinism: Social and migration policies as legitimation tools for populists. The case of PiS in Poland

Previous research identified two types of causes behind the rise of populism. Economic explanations point to material insecurity (Guriev, 2018), while identity explanations refer to growing cultural divides between elites and the electorate (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). The electoral successes of populist parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are said to reside in the skilful combination of materially redistributive and culturally conservative arguments (Bill & Stanley, 2020, p. 802; Korolczuk & Graff, 2018). PiS in Poland in particular successfully re-politicised material inequality, after nearly three decades of an anti-statist neoliberal consensus that insisted on the necessity to restructure, privatise and cut costs. This paper tests the 'redistribution cum conservatism' claim through comparing the electoral promises and adopted policies of the two major political parties in Poland – the populists of Law and Justice (PiS) and the liberals of Civic Platform (PO). The policy field chosen to represent social policy or material arguments is care, while migration policy represents cultural claims. The analysis is based on a systematic examination of both parties’ websites, their 2015 and 2019 electoral programmes, and seventeen expert interviews. The paper shows that PiS reframed economic inequality in nationalist cultural terms and nationalism as a pragmatic orientation requiring concrete social and economic policies. There is however more continuity between the content of PiS’s populist illiberal and PO’s technocratic liberal policies than suggested so far in the literature. The Polish case shows thus that, in the welfare and migration domains, the novelty of illiberalism resides less in substantive policy change than in the discursive combination of a polity’s core ideological principles, that can be mobilised by populists or by other political parties.