Political opposition is crucial for democracy. The ways oppositions operate differ. The aim of this paper is to investigate political opposition in post-communist Poland. We are interested in the mechanisms of consensus and cooperation between government and opposition parties. Our analysis is not limited to the legislative process alone; it is broader, as we investigate similarities between parties’ electorates and elites. Our study starts from the assumption that the alleged (if unveiled) convergence of governments and oppositions in the parliament is due to centripetal ideological tendencies on the mass and consequently the elite level. We expect that with the passage of ’democratic time’ and simultaneous processes of cartelisation of post-communist political systems parties converge ideologically and programmatically, and thus in parliament vote more and more similarly. This phenomenon applies to the socio-economic domain, it however manifests itself differently as far as identitarian, social-cultural policies are taken into account. There are two major theoretical arguments explaining this convergence process: first derives from the cartelisation theory, second – from the democratisation theory. We test our hypothesis using data on mass and elite policy positions (survey data). Our analysis is of diachronic genre – we compare phases of Polish democracy (electoral cycles), from the third fully democratic parliamentary election in the 1997 to the last election in the 2011.
