The opposition in local government in Poland: a mirror image of national democratic backsliding?

Recent studies on democratic backsliding increasingly often focus on subnational levels. However, they are usually general texts (e.g. Charron et al. 2022; Gervasoni, 2024) or case studies concerning first of all authoritarian states, e.g. Russia (Obydenkova and Libman 2013) or Venezuela (Polga-Hecimovich, 2022). The democratic countries investigated are mainly from Latin America (Benton, 2012; Mera, 2016). In all these cases, there is little focus on political parties, including the situation of opposition, which is considered an indicator of the state of democracy. This paper, focusing on one of the workshop questions, i.e. the role and conditions of opposition in local government, aims to fill this gap and investigate Poland, a Central European country, understudied in terms of the subnational deterioration of democracy. The country experienced significant democratic backsliding at the national level in 2015-2023 (Zamęcki, Mieńkowska-Norkiene and Szymański, 2023). This process was reflected, for example, in the dominance of the executive branch and incumbents at the expense of the legislative branch and opposition parties in the parliament, first of all in the lower chamber – the Sejm (Szymański, 2020; Ilonszki and Dudzińska, 2021). A research question arises whether opposition parties at the local level mirror the national trend of weakening opposition, showing a democratic decline at the local level. The paper shows the findings of a pilot project financed by the Polish National Science Centre. The authors, focusing on selected cities (of different sizes and political constellations) in 5 out of 16 Polish provinces, present two main arguments. Firstly, in spite of legal changes made in 2018 and giving new powers to the local opposition in city councils, its influence on decision-making and control over the governing majority is limited, although the situation varies, depending on the power relationships in councils and the attitude of incumbents toward the opposition. Secondly, this situation does not reflect democratic backsliding, also present at the local level, but a long-term deficit of local democracy, which has only been enhanced since 2015. The paper is based on the theoretical framework consisting of two pillars: democracy/(de-)democratisation – considering different models of democracy and the concept of “democratic enclave” (Gilley, 2010) as well as the territorial dimension of politics. The proposed study, which is mainly qualitative, is based on data from local media, two focus group interviews – with seven local journalists and NGOs members, respectively (Autumn 2022) as well as 32 in-depth semi-structured interviews with city authorities – from legislative and executive bodies and various political parties so as to have different perspectives, and with experts working on democracy in the analysed cities (May 2023–May 2024). The qualitative data are supplemented by insights from the original public opinion data, revealing how Poles have viewed and evaluated both the national and local democracy over time. The main methods of data analysis are the discourse analysis (Maxqda software) combined with the elements of process tracing, which enables to identify the causal chains, thus reasons behind the worsening situation of the opposition parties in the analysed cities.