Understanding change and continuity in Polish politics - political elites, the party politics of higher education and the impact of right-wing populism (1989-2021)

This cumulative dissertation expands our knowledge of parties, political elites, and parliamentary debates in Poland since the onset of the post-socialist transformation to 2021. The single-country study comprises four case studies on the recruitment of post-socialist political elites, parliamentary debates, and the respective impact of populist right parties. To better understand processes linked to elite recruitment, the thesis focuses on the policy field of higher education, which enjoyed a particularly high salience in Poland’s process of “catching up with the West”.

The dissertation finds an increasing salience of higher education policies among political elites in party manifestos, parliamentary debates, and reforms, which is comparable to trends observed in Western Europe. The qualitative content analysis of 41 party manifestos highlights the unique character of partisan debates in Poland, making Polish parties clearly distinguishable from their West European counterparts. While the parties align in their positioning regarding the question of how universities should be steered, there are clear differences regarding redistributive questions. The key results for the positioning of populist right parties can be summarized as follows: the more established these parties are, the more interest they exhibit in their party manifestos and the more they engage in debates in this policy field beyond their typical core themes. Furthermore, since the emergence of populist right parties in Poland in the early 2000s, there has been a deterioration in the culture of parliamentary debate, a growing government-opposition divide in votes, and more fundamental criticism in the rhetoric of the Polish parliament.

In contrast to these parties’ frequent calls for lustration and an exchange of elites, the three governments led by the populist right party Law and Justice have had only a limited impact on the composition of Polish political elites. Two studies on political elites in post-socialist Eastern Europe show a sociodemographic homogeneity of elites for the period from 1990 to 2020. Poland exhibits comparatively strong continuities of former supporters of the socialist regime as well as of the opposition among contemporary political elites. A comparison with the former GDR points to country-specific recruitment patterns with regard to the previous role in socialism and the female share of elites.

The long-term research period from 1989 to 2021 allows for a better understanding of the path dependencies, reverberations, and legacies from socialism, as well as helps to contribute to explaining the evolution of Polish politics. As Poland converges with other OECD countries in terms of economic and political development, the study offers promising avenues to situate Poland more as a focus of comparative political science.