Between Democracy and Party Interests: Explaining the Enduring Rule-Of-Law Crisis in Poland

Why have Poland’s rule of law standards not improved despite the opposition’s ascent to power in December 2023? This article argues that the persistence of a polarizing strategy, used by both incumbents and opposition to sharpen party identities by reducing politics to binary choices, has become a primary obstacle to rule of law restoration. While existing accounts emphasize structural constraints (e.g., institutional packing), I show that continued polarization by the current governing coalition (especially the main ruling party Civic Coalition, KO) mobilizes its core voters but undermines the elite consensus and cross camp bargaining that the rule of law requires in constitutional practice. The result is a cycle in which rhetorical delegitimization of rivals and confrontational institutional tactics sustain political and affective polarization and yield legally questionable measures, even after alternation in power. Empirically, the study examines government discourse and initiatives since December 2023 and explains why they have not yet raised rule of law standards. Methodologically, it employs a qualitative single case design that combines (1) thematic discourse analysis to identify how judicial reform and related problems are framed in political discourse, and (2) process tracing (in the sense of George & Bennett 2005) to reconstruct the causal sequences linking rhetorical choices of incumbents, their institutional tactics to their political consequences for the main ruling party Civic Coalition. The article integrates insights from research on pernicious polarization and party competition to theorize polarizing strategy as an explanatory factor in Poland’s ongoing rule of law crisis. The findings highlight a core dilemma: strategies that are electorally effective, turn out to be counterproductive for rebuilding the rule of law, whose restoration inevitably rests on compromise between legal and political elites.