The 2007 Polish general election confirmed a significant shift in patterns of elite political competition, with the inherited ‘regime divide’ superseded by a ‘transition divide’ defined by the ‘liberal-orthodox’ model of post-communist reform. However, the existing literature on Polish voting behaviour consists mainly of synchronic analyses that focus on the effect of particular structural or attitudinal variables, rather than diachronic analyses of the changing relationships between structures, attitudes, party preferences and voting behaviour. This paper seeks to fill that gap. It finds that there was no clear evidence of cleavage change over the period: there was more consistency than flux in preferences, and only limited shifts in the influence of particular variables on voting behaviour.
