The Right as a Constant Part of the Public Sphere in Poland

Contrary to Western Europe, Polish society has the experience of living in an authoritarian single-party socialist state established in the end of the Second World War, and known in 1952–1989 under its official name as PRL (Polish People’s Republic). As a consequence, the political field controlling the distribution of power during the PRL—with a dominant position of PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party—Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) at the helm of the state, with ornamental roles played by its satellites: ZSL (United Peasant Party—Zjednoczone Stronnictwo Ludowe) and SD (Democratic Party—Stronnictwo Demokratyczne), and the growing anti-communist dissident movement taking clear shape in 1980 around the Solidarity workers’ union—strongly informed the post-1989 constellation of the democratic partisan landscape (Markowski Reference Markowski1997; Kitschelt et al. Reference Kitschelt, Tóka, Mansfeldová and Markowski1999; Shabad and Słomczyński Reference Shabad and Słomczyński1999; Ekiert Reference Ekiert2011; Buštíková and Kitschelt Reference Buštíková and Kitschelt2009). This post-communist specificity resulted in right-wing parties and politicians being explicitly anti-communist and emphasizing their roots in Solidarity (Gwiazda Reference Gwiazda2008, Koczanowicz Reference Koczanowicz2008).

As the Right has been an inherent part of the public sphere after 1989, ZP is not the first right-wing government in post-communist Poland. Between 1991 and 1992, Poland was governed by three short-lived consecutive coalitions of mostly center-right and right-wing parties. Two of them, PCFootnote ² and ZChN, together with two centrist liberal parties—KLD and SD—formed a government with Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, who kept his position as prime minister for less than a year, until the end of the parliamentary term in 1991. The first government during the next parliamentary term survived for approximately seven months and comprised PC, ZChN and PSL-PL with Jan Olszewski as prime minister who was replaced for one month by Waldemar Pawlak from PSL. Hanna Suchocka from UD was prime minister between July 1992 and October 1993 at the helm of the consecutive government coalition composed of right-wing ZChN, and PSL-PL, as well as PChD, KLD, UD, and PPPP. The Polish Right came back to power in 1997–2001, after four years of government led by the social-democratic SLD, with the AWS-UW coalition, and again in 2005–2007 when PiS was first a minority government and afterwards (2006–2007) ruled in coalition with the radical right LPR and radical agrarian SRP.

The presence of right-wing parties in Polish politics goes beyond their roles in governing coalitions. This is clear from table 1, where I listed all parties and electoral alliances that I identified as being right-wing and radical right, as well as agrarian, centrist-liberal, and socialist. They are listed according to POLPAN waves, presented in the table in pairs, to flesh out the general diversification and the changing number of right-wing parties across three decades. I identified these parties and electoral alliances on the basis of two comparative datasets: the Manifesto Project Dataset (Volkens et al. Reference Volkens, Burst, Krause, Lehmann, Theres, Regel, Weßels and Zehnter2021) and the 1999–2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (Jolly et al. Reference Jolly, Bakker, Hooghe, Marks, Polk, Rovny, Steenbergen and Vachudova2022), works that use programmatic and policy-driven criteria in classification of the political parties and alliances in Poland (Kowalczyk Reference Kowalczyk2014; Shabad and Słomczyński Reference Shabad and Słomczyński1999; Lewandowski Reference Lewandowski2016; Jasiewicz Reference Jasiewicz2008a; Minkenberg Reference Minkenberg2013; Buštíková Reference Buštíková and Rydgren2018; Heinisch et al. Reference Heinisch, Saxonberg, Werner and Habersack2021; Fijał Reference Fijał, Sondel-Cedarmas and Berti2022; Pankowski Reference Pankowski2010), as well as those basing their classifications on respondents’ self-placement and party placement on the left-right scale (Flis and Kwiatkowska Reference Flis, Kwiatkowska, Wojtaszczyk, Stawarz and Wiśniewska-Grzelak2018; Kwiatkowska et al. Reference Kwiatkowska, Cześnik, Żerkowska-Balas and Stanley2016; CBOS 2021). Following most of these works, I do not treat economic policy as a decisive factor in the classification. Conceptualized in this way, right-wing politics in Poland has only partially resembled its Western counterparts by putting emphasis on national sovereignty and on the importance of upholding the national tradition and identity (Buštíková and Kitschelt Reference Buštíková and Kitschelt2009, 462) being classified closer to the Traditional/Authoritarian/Nationalist extreme on the GALTAN axis (Vachudova Reference Vachudova2021, 484). I also accounted for the change occurring in party stances: PO started as a center-right, Christian-democratic party to subsequently, after 2005, moved to more explicit centrist-liberal positions whereas PiS, more or less simultaneously, moved toward radical right-wing positions (Buštíková Reference Buštíková and Rydgren2018; Rydgren Reference Rydgren and Rydgren2018) emphasizing more decisively the importance of traditional values, national myths, and cultural identity, as well as the need for economic protectionism.

Table 1 Parties and electoral alliances according to POLPAN waves

Note: *Classified as right-wing only in the 2003 wave.

For more discussion on the classification refer to note 1 in the online appendix.

Acronyms of parties and party alliances (1991–2018) not explained within the text are listed in the Appendix following the References section.

The partisan representation of the Right was, therefore, dispersed among many parties in the beginning of the 1990s to largely converge into a loose center-right coalition in 1997 in the form of AWS, an instable coalition in 2006–2007, and in 2015 and 2019 when there was one dominant right-wing party, PiS, with its two coalition satellites, as well as right-wing K’15 (8.81% of the votes and 42 seats in the parliament) in 2015–2019 and radical right KORWiN (6.81% of the votes and 11 seats) since 2019. The period during which PiS was at the lead of ruling coalitions is also the time when the position of the country’s president, who is elected directly and holds inter alia the veto power, was occupied by right-wing politicians: Lech Kaczyński (2005–2010) and Andrzej Duda (since 2015 until now).

Throughout these ebbs and flows, the support for the Right in parliamentary elections to the Sejm never fell below 29% since 1991, as I show in figure 1. The constant presence of the Right in the public sphere therefore made the 2015 double electoral success of ZP a surprise only with respect to the presidential election, where the incumbent Bronisław Komorowski, supported by PO, was defeated. As for the parliamentary elections, the surprise was associated with an unexpected consequence of the elections, that is, a parliamentary majority for ZP without the need for a post-electoral coalition, rather than the Right’s relative advantage over the weakened incumbent PO. Figure 1 also shows that support for the Right was a sinusoid since 1991, growing in one election to fall afterwards. This trend was broken twice: first in 2011, when support failed to rise after it had dropped in 2007, and in 2019, when the 2015 level of support was largely maintained by the Right.

Figure 1 Share of votes and seats in the Sejm held by right-wing parties, and support for the Right according to two POLPAN questionnaire items

Source: PKW 2023; Sejm 2023; Słomczyński and Tomescu-Dubrow Reference Słomczyński and Tomescu-Dubrow2021.

*PO as right-wing.

The Right Turning the Page: The End of the Transitional Consensus

The 1990s and the first half of the 2000s were marked by a general consensus among post-Solidarity and post-communist political elites. This post-communist “transitional culture” (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2002) extended over the second decade of the twenty-first century and referred to economic and foreign policies (Markowski Reference Markowski1997, 223). In the economy, it consisted in the lack of divergence from the Polish post-communist variant of the “embedded neoliberal” regime, characterized by the partial continuity of welfare institutions from the state-socialist period and dependence on foreign capital and actors, including later the EU, in the construction of free market economic policies (Bohle and Greskovits Reference Bohle and Greskovits2012; Jasiecki Reference Jasiecki2017). The reasons for the foreign policy concord were different on each side of the political divide. The engagement in mainstream European politics in the beginning of the 1990s by SLD, an indirect successor of PZPR, was in large part perceived as protection against the surge of radical right-wing politics (Zioło Reference Zioło2009; Jasiewicz Reference Jasiewicz2008a). On the other hand, the mostly post-Solidarity Right perceived European integration as a civilizational goal, a final break with the communist legacy, linked with corruption as well as social, political, and economic stagnation. After 2001, when the radical right-wing anti-EU LPR party won 36 seats in the lower chamber of parliament, Eurosceptic discourse found a space, if still marginal, in the mainstream, acquiring cultural and moral dimensions, striving to disengage from integration policies originating from the “decadent” West, and promoting the idea of a Europe of Nations (Shibata Reference Shibata2013). The presence of hardline Euroscepticism in the political mainstream was a clear sign that the cultural weight of this consensus left a lot of space for identity politics (Ost Reference Ost2005; CBOS 2000). If we define the neoliberal project in globalist terms, consisting in abolishing all barriers to free trade (Slobodian Reference Slobodian2018), then the Polish right-wing security project of restricting globalizing change, both cultural and economic, through national-level policies, had a very fertile base of support. Furthermore, it was easy for the Right to take ownership of economic grievances in Poland, because SLD, the main left-wing party, had been deeply engaged in transition politics and carried the political weight of PZPR while dealing after 2002 with a very consequential Rywin affair (Mencwel Reference Mencwel2009).

The gradual end of this consensus, first on the level of discourse, then in policy, was concomitant with the emergence of a new main divide on the Polish political scene in late 2005, with the failed coalition negotiations between PiS and PO (Słomczyński and Shabad Reference Słomczyński and Shabad2003; Bustikova and Kitschelt Reference Buštíková and Kitschelt2009; Żerkowska-Balas, Lyubashenko, and Kwiatkowska Reference Żerkowska-Balas, Lyubashenko and Kwiatkowska2016; Matthes Reference Matthes2016). These two post-Solidarity parties that put out joint electoral lists in the local elections to 14 out of 16 voivodship councils (sejmiki wojewódzkie) in 2002 (Grabowska Reference Grabowska2004, 290), have been the main rivals on the Polish political scene since 2005. The petrification of this divergence can be traced to the events and aftermath of April 10, 2010, the date of a catastrophic crash of the Polish presidential airplane with 96 passengers on board, among whom were president Lech Kaczyński, as well as members of the Polish parliament and military (Cześnik Reference Cześnik2014). The trajectory of right-wing politics in Poland resembles in this way the “populist polarization” in Hungary in its paradoxical institutionalization of anti-establishment politics and polarization in the form of relatively stable governments, as well as a stable party system (Rovny and Polk Reference Rovny and Polk2017)—for almost 20 years—in which citizens vote for systemic alternatives instead of for parties (Enyedi Reference Enyedi2020).

In consequence, after taking power in 2015, the ZP decisively upended the post-communist status quo in Poland. The most internationally visible move was to undermine the political independence of the judicial system, which resulted in a conflict with the European Commission over infringements of the rule of law (Sadurski Reference Sadurski2020). Other policies pursued by the government consisted in a steady course towards centralization characterized by various pressures, including financial ones, being imposed on local governments (in urban areas mostly controlled by the opposition), thus weakening one of the fundamental reforms of post-communist Poland, aiming to establish and develop local and regional governance (Wojnicki Reference Wojnicki2020; Flis and Swianiewicz Reference Flis and Swianiewicz2021). Through centralization of public financing, ZP has been marginalizing civil society organizations that were not acting in line with its political agenda, and pulling previously independent organizations closer to the state, thus leading to a heightened cultural war, with restrictions on the right to abortion in 2020 as its pinnacle (Kotwas and Kubik Reference Kotwas and Kubik2019; Bill Reference Bill2022). The takeover of a large proportion of local and regional newspapers and journals, as well as attempts at taking control over liberal-leaning media, played an important part in this process (Klimkiewicz Reference Klimkiewicz2021).

Going along this route of systemic change in the realm of economic policy as well, in 2015 ZP headed the first government that broke with free-market subtexts by implementing, as its flagship policies, expansive social programs such as the “500 plus” child allowance and regular raises of minimum wage and pensions, as well as by undoing the PO-PSL government’s reform which had raised the retirement age. In this way, ZP expanded and strengthened the distinction, articulated by PiS since 2005, between their “solidarity-based” vision of Poland and PO’s “liberal” politics focused on securing the narrow interest of the winners of the transition (Cześnik and Kotnarowski Reference Cześnik and Kotnarowski2011). ZP reversed policies of all consecutive Polish governments, including its own policies during its first time in power in 2005–2007, as well as the political choices of Jarosław Kaczyński’s first party, PC, which had not shied away from coalitions with economically liberal parties in the beginning of the 1990s. Importantly, the post-2015 change also extended to incorporate the rejection of closer EU integration (CBOS 2017). One of its symptoms has been PiS’s engagement with right-wing Eurosceptic political parties including the Hungarian Fidesz, the French National Front, the Spanish VOX, and the Italian League, accompanied, e.g., by common declarations of tighter cooperation in the future, including the idea to establish a new faction in the European Parliament (Le Pen Reference Le Pen2021). This path for ZP was in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to the large extent paved by Viktor Orbán’s governments which also curtailed the media freedom, as well as carried out a thorough replacement of cultural, political, civil society, and business elites in Hungary (Enyedi Reference Enyedi2016).

Right-Wing Voters

Since 1989, the majority of Poles have been able to place themselves on a left-right scale (Grabowska and Szawiel Reference Grabowska and Szawiel2001, 251; Godlewski Reference Godlewski2008). There is also a significant relationship between self-identification on the left-right scale and voting for parties placed as such (Kwiatkowska et al. Reference Kwiatkowska, Cześnik, Żerkowska-Balas and Stanley2016).

In terms of substantive attitudes, the right-wing electorate was characterized by a set of stable features in the last thirty years. One of them has been anti-communism. In the 1990s and 2000s, it translated into support for lustration and related attempts at excluding former functionaries of the communist party from public life (Grabowska and Szawiel Reference Grabowska and Szawiel2001, 238–253; Killingsworth Reference Killingsworth2010). Previous research also suggests that people who are more attached to the institution of the Catholic Church, who regularly attend church services and declare that traditional Catholic values are inseparable from the Polish national identity, are more likely to support right-wing parties (Pankowski Reference Pankowski, Kolarska-Bobińska and Markowski1997; Grabowska and Szawiel Reference Grabowska and Szawiel2001; Szawiel Reference Szawiel and Markowski2002; Jasiewicz Reference Jasiewicz and Markowski2002; Kwiatkowska et al. Reference Kwiatkowska, Cześnik, Żerkowska-Balas and Stanley2016; Żerkowska-Balas, Lyubashenko, and Kwiatkowska Reference Żerkowska-Balas, Lyubashenko and Kwiatkowska2016). It is, therefore, not an accident that all right-wing parties emphasized the importance of the Catholic Church for Poland’s independence. In addition, in 2005 church attendance and self-placement on the right were already predictors for being a stable voter (Cześnik Reference Cześnik2009, 117–120). Accordingly, the nature of populism in Poland, where it is connected almost solely with right-wing politics, has also been charged with cultural factors, lately by those concerning liberal cultural policies and trends politicized in partisan debates on European integration (Fitzgibbon and Guerra Reference Fitzgibbon and Guerra2010; Fomina and Kucharczyk Reference Fomina and Kucharczyk2016; CBOS 2017). Authoritarian conservatism is often displayed by individuals supporting right-wing policies and parties in Poland and abroad (Swindal Reference Swindal2011; CBOS 2012; CBOS 2015; Freire and Kivistik Reference Freire and Kivistik2016). These cultural and historical identities, rather than economic factors, were argued to be the most efficient weapons of the Right on the political battleground (Markowski and Cześnik Reference Markowski, Cześnik and Markowski2002; Skarżyńska and Henne Reference Skarżyńska and Henne2011; Kwiatkowska et al. Reference Kwiatkowska, Cześnik, Żerkowska-Balas and Stanley2016), and were accordingly emphasized in the explanations of its recent political success in 2015 (Matthes Reference Matthes2016).

Class boundaries and status differences, at least until the 2010s, were not regarded as characteristics dividing voters between those supporting the Right and the rest. Class distinctions, for example, have been used to identify those who were losers rather than winners of the economic transformation: a post-communist parallel to the losers of globalization discussed in the literature on Western Europe and the United States. The early 1990s brought disillusionment among workers and farmers with basic education, with the unfolding new economic regime not providing economic protection and stability comparable to that offered by state socialism (Kurczewski Reference Kurczewski1994, 418). This explicit resentment was not translated into any specific partisan support during the first decade of the Third Republic of Poland, with the vote of the working class (“skilled and unskilled workers” and “farmers and agricultural laborers”) being divided between social democratic SLD and UP and post-Solidarity center-right AWS. In contrast, the intelligentsia were much more likely to support liberal UW, and its predecessors UD and KLD (Domański Reference Domański2008, 175–178).

Explanations of the Illiberal Turn

Since the right-wing electorate exhibited largely stable features over the last 30 years, explanations of the recent electoral success of illiberal politics in Poland must build on—but also go beyond—the issues discussed thus far. While some comparative works precisely point to the lack of radical shifts in public opinion that could have served as a convincing demand-side explanation for the recent surge of illiberalism (Bartels Reference Bartels2017), other authors consider the fact that populist discourse has been more ubiquitous in CEE lately (Engler, Pytlas, and Deegan-Krause Reference Engler, Pytlas and Deegan-Krause2019), focus on systemic crises and opportunities that opened up for “ethnopopulist” political entrepreneurs (Vachudova Reference Vachudova2020) providing various security projects to their voters (Blyth Reference Blyth2016) through intensification of culturally salient discourses (Kotwas and Kubik Reference Kotwas and Kubik2019) or point to long-term processes of identity formation leading to the abandonment of social democratic parties by workers (Goodwin Reference Goodwin, Needham and Weitzdörfer2019). The question remains how these anti-establishment political actors keep their appeal when they become the elite. Attempts at solving this problem included the elaboration of “paternalist populism” consisting of “switching” public’s attention from the national political elite to the “real elite”—international institutions (Enyedi Reference Enyedi2020) and polarizing national politics along the GALTAN axis as it was done by Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic (Hanley and Vachudova Reference Hanley and Vachudova2018).

Some studies associate this electoral change with the 2008 economic crisis (Blyth Reference Blyth2016), that could have made the economic factor much more salient. Some works draw a straight line from the economic crisis to the radicalization of politics, pointing to Central and Eastern Europe suffering a “forgotten crisis” (Tooze Reference Tooze2019, 220-238). Analyses of voting behavior indeed show that economic assessments were an important factor shaping the vote after 2008. In 2011, a positive assessment of the condition of Poland’s economy was associated with a higher probability of voting for the incumbent PO-PSL, whereas those dissatisfied with the economy tended to vote for PiS (Kotnarowski and Markowski Reference Kotnarowski and Markowski2014). Other studies emphasize the importance of the socioeconomic factor while underlining that it became relevant already around 2005, with the beginning of the newly emerged PiS-PO divide (Jasiewicz Reference Jasiewicz2008b) leading to a clear-cut partisan divide between the right-wing coalition and centrist-liberal voters (Tworzecki Reference Tworzecki2019), with the former being also more populist (Stanley Reference Stanley2019). ZP’s success was also perceived as a paradox by some, which is supported by the fact that its achievement of obtaining a majority of the parliamentary seats in 2015 was in large part a consequence of other electoral results: almost 16% of the vote was gathered by two parties and an electoral coalition that did not enter the parliamentFootnote ³ (Markowski Reference Markowski2016). In addition, Poland did not experience high unemployment, austerity, or recession (Markowski and Kwiatkowska Reference Markowski and Kwiatkowska2018). That said, the Right did increase its vote in 2015, reaching its 2005 level of support, and ZP got a larger share of the right-wing vote, which remained stable overall, in 2019. What is more, some authors, by focusing on the process of economic transformation and the fact that economic growth did not benefit all social groups equally, find the “illiberal moment” as less of a contradiction (Bernhard Reference Bernhard2021).

Indeed, although the claims about the comparatively good shape of the Polish economy during the global financial crisis are correct on the aggregate level, if we look at the level of unemployment across time according to the level of education, it is clear that those with lower education suffered comparatively more; 2009 marks the beginning of growing unemployment for all education categories. However, whereas it grew by 1.2% (from 3.8% to 5%) between 2008 and 2010 for people with higher education, it grew by 3.75% on average for other categories during the same period, e.g. from 11.9% to 17.3% for “Lower secondary, elementary and lower secondary” (figure 2). The difference between those with the lowest education and those with higher education is especially striking in 2013, when the unemployment rate peaked, reaching 20.3% for the former and 5.7% for the latter population.

Figure 2 Rate of unemployment according to education level among professionally active population in Poland, 1995–2020

Source: GUS (Local Data Bank).

The fact that this situation took place after a period of declining unemployment could have left an imprint of authenticity on the PiS narrative, claiming that only the affluent part of Polish society benefitted from the PO-PSL government policies. The second half of the 2000s, therefore, was a period during which Poland witnessed a set of compounding factors, making the field for the right-wing security project more fertile. First of all, the demand for a qualified workforce has been actually growing in Poland, signaled also by the fact that in the mid-2000s it gained the label of “high-income country” (World Bank Group 2017). This phenomenon tends to leave people with basic education behind: they often lose their jobs or suffer lower wages, a process that can result in wage polarization without adequate investments in human capital (Rozelle et al. Reference Rozelle, Xia, Friesen, Vanderjack and Cohen2020). The risk of unemployment in Poland has, therefore, been unevenly distributed, a phenomenon that often leads to a lack of social consensus for generous unemployment benefits (Rehm Reference Rehm2011, 288) and for expansion of the welfare state in general. The result was that the less educated groups—in contrast to highly educated—experienced the opening of the economy as a risk, and turned to parties that could minimize this threat (Walter Reference Walter2010). We can even expect that this wage polarization and uneven unemployment risk were experienced also as social and political polarization—those with much safer jobs perceived, for example, the raising of retirement age by PO-PSL government as a much more positive perspective opening the possibility to earn more money before retirement. For those with lower education, more often working in blue collar jobs, it meant more time spent in physically taxing work. This polarization has likely been built through inter alia personal interactions between, for example, family members.

Data and Variables

The dependent variable I use in the analysis is either dichotomous or categorical with three values, and contains information on partisan support at the time of the interview. The coding of the dependent variable follows the division of parties and electoral alliances as proposed in table 1. In the dichotomous variables used in logistic regressions the value of 1, therefore, always implies support for a right-wing party, whereas 0 can indicate either explicit lack of support for any party combined with the support for a non-right-wing party (first variant of the dependent variable), or just support for a non-right-wing party (second variant of the dependent variable). In multinomial regressions the outcome 0 stands for supporting right-wing parties, 1 means the lack of support for any party and supporting a non-right-wing party in the first variant, or the support for a non-right-wing party in the second, whereas value 2 stands for the support for a radical right party. I used two base outcomes in my analyses: 0 and 1. I compiled these variables using the questionnaire item referring to prospective voting. Depending on the POLPAN wave, this item takes one of two versions. The first version was used in 1993, 1998, and 2003 and contains two consecutive questions: “If the elections for Sejm and Senate happened in the near future, would you participate in them?” followed with a question on prospective party preference (“What party would you vote for?”). In 2008, 2013, and 2018, these two questions were replaced with a single item (“If there were elections next Sunday, which party would you vote for?”). Since I follow change across time in individuals, the measure of prospective voting is much more reliable in statistical models than the information on retrospective voting, which is also available from POLPAN (refer to table 1 in the online appendix). Using the questions about party support rather than about voting also makes the dependent variable closer to conventional measures of partisanship, which rely on different survey instruments that all aim to capture a concept different from voting itself (Bankert, Huddy, and Rosema Reference Bankert, Huddy and Rosema2017). The relation between partisanship and voting, however, is very strong (Holmberg Reference Holmberg, Kent Jennings and Mann1994, Reference Holmberg, Dalton and Klingemann2007). My choice of “partisanship,” rather than voting, as the phenomenon of interest was also motivated by studies based on interviews with ZP’s supporters (Gdula, Dębska, and Trepka Reference Gdula, Dębska and Trepka2017) suggesting that consequent voting for PiS is very often concomitant with stronger identification with this party relative to other electorates (Sadura and Sierakowski Reference Sadura and Sierakowski2019, 6–9).

The literature firmly states that voting for the Right in Poland is strongly associated with attachment to the Catholic Church, in the institutional and ideational sense. I constructed two variables measuring such commitment: frequency of attending church services, and opinion about the institution of the Catholic Church vis-à-vis politics. The first variable, named “Church attendance” has four values: 1 stands for “Never,” 2 for “Less frequently than once a month,” 3 for “At least once a month but less frequently than once a week,” and 4 for “Once a week or more frequently.”Footnote ⁴ The second variable, “Catholic Church and politics,” contains information on the extent to which the respondent agrees with the following statement: “The Catholic Church has too much influence on political decisions of the state.” I coded “strongly disagree” as 5 and “strongly agree” as 1. The remaining statements were coded in the following way: somewhat agree as 2, neither agree nor disagree as 3, and somewhat disagree as 4.

“Opinion about the EU” measures the general opinion about and support for Poland’s membership in the EU. For 1998, it is based on the question regarding the future vote in the referendum (“If the referendum regarding Poland’s entry into the European Union were to take place now, would you vote …”). It is coded 3 for voting against the accession, 1 for voting for it, and 2 for “difficult to say.” For the 2003 wave, when the outcome of the referendum was already known, the variable is based on the question about the predicted impact of EU membership on Poland (“Do you think that Poland’s entry into the European Union will have a positive or negative impact on your life, or will it have no impact at all?”). It is coded 1 for “positive (or somewhat positive),” 3 for “negative (or somewhat negative),” and 2 for “no impact at all.” In 2008, 2013, and 2018, this variable measures the general opinion about the impact of EU accession on Poland. In 2008, it is coded from 1 to 3 and follows the logic of the variable compiled for 2003. For 2013 and 2018, it has values from 0 to 10: the higher the value, the more negative the opinion about the impact of the EU accession on Poland.

I compiled two sets of variables suggested in the relevant literature as measures of respective populist and authoritarian attitudes. The first variable, “Conflict between the elite and the people” from the populism set, records the respondent’s opinion on the severity of conflict between the elite, referred to in the questionnaires as “those in power,” and the rest of society. The second one (“Minority yields to majority”) contains information on the respondents’ opinion about the statement “Democracy means that after elections the minority must yield to the majority.” I do not put the category of populism in the center of my analysis, treating it as a performative tool or repertoire (Bonikowski and Gidron Reference Bonikowski and Gidron2016) rather than a distinctive characteristic of a party family (Müller Reference Müller2016; Mudde Reference Mudde2007, Reference Mudde2016b).

The set of variables measuring support for authoritarian politics is organized around the notion of the centralization of power in the hands of a single party or leader. Each variable contains information on the opinion of respondents regarding two separate statements: “It would suffice if a single good political party ruled in Poland. Other parties would be superfluous then” (One good party is enough), and “If a wise person governs the country, he or she need not obey the law” (Good leader can be above the law).

These three variables measuring respondents’ opinions on characteristics of political regimes are coded from 1 to 5 (1 for Strongly disagree, 2 for Rather disagree, 3 for Neither agree nor disagree, 4 for Rather agree, 5 for Strongly agree) and the remaining “Conflict between the elite and the people” from 1 to 4 (1 for No conflicts, 2 for Rather weak, 3 for Strong, 4 for Very strong). The last variable measures respondents’ opinion about the period of state socialism (“Opinion about state socialism”). It ranges from 1 to 5 and follows the logic of the four variables mentioned earlier.

For factor analysis,Footnote ⁵ I used the following issue position questions: “Large differences in income are necessary to assure the prosperity of the country”; “The state should assist children from poor families in facilitating their access to higher education”; “The state is responsible for reducing differences in people’s incomes”; “The state should provide jobs for everyone who wants to work”; “The Catholic Church has too much influence on political decisions of the state”; and respondents’ opinion on the EU. I coded the last two variables as described previously. The rest is coded from 1 to 5 according to the following logic: the higher the value, the higher the support for the redistributive policies. Independent variables in multinomial logistic regressions were constructed on the basis of said factor scores.

“Gender” is coded 1 for male and 0 for female, whereas the “Age” variable specifies the age of each respondent at the time of the interview. I also included respondents’ “Place of residence” coded 5 for rural, 4 for municipalities with less than 20,000 inhabitants, 3 for those with 20,000–99,999 inhabitants, 2 for 100,000-499,999, and 1 for population over 500,000. The level of education was coded as 0 for above primary and 1for primary or lower.

A separate battery of variables focuses on the financial and social status of respondents. I included binary variables indicating whether the respondent is unemployed or not. For financial status, I included standardized household income per capita, and for social status, “Self-assessed social position” was compiled on the basis of a questionnaire item that recorded respondents locating themselves on the social position scale—the higher the number, the higher the position.