Trusting the Untrustworthy: An Exploration of Attitudes Towards the Populist Government in Poland Using Survey Data

Abstract

The study explores attitudinal change in political trust, social trust and satisfaction with the Polish government over the years 2012–2016 using European Social Survey (ESS) data. To trace the attitudinal change, I used a probit model (contemporary measure) instrumenting political trust and satisfaction with governance as two endogenous regressors and created lags corresponding to years before and after the Law and Justice Party came to power. The key finding of the study is that voters dissatisfied with the government before the 2015 election campaign voted for the populist party, while the contemporary measure identified individuals with a higher degree of political trust and those sceptical towards their immediate social circle as supportive of the populist incumbent.

The author is grateful to Julia Korosteleva, Elodie Douarin, Istvan Benczes, Carolin Heilig and Luca J. Uberti for their invaluable comments and insightful discussion regarding this article. This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 765224.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The source of data is a pooled-cross-section; however, the study examines a temporal change in attitudes. Therefore, throughout the article I refer to the estimation performed on the 2016 data as a ‘contemporary measure’, to which all the subsequent lags are created (L1 for 2014, and L2 for 2012 data).

2 The Polish parliament consists of two chambers, the 460-member Sejm (lower house) and a 100-member Senate (upper house). Candidates running for the Sejm must be at least 18 years of age (the mininum for senators is 30) and are listed by single constituency. Based on votes gained, seats are allocated using Hondt’s method, which favours party-list candidates over independents.

3 Koalicja Obywatelska (KO) is a coalition of centrally-placed parties that stood together for the 2019 parliamentary election. KO’s listing included: Civic Platform, Nowoczesna (Modern), and two non-parliamentary groups Greens and the Polish Initiative (Lewandowski 2021, p. 178).

4 The means are reported in the descriptive statistics, see Table 3.

5 ‘ESS Survey 6–8, 2012–2016’, Cumulative data file, European Social Survey, available at: https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/downloadwizard/, accessed 19 September 2020.

6 To better develop this argument, I provide descriptive statistics that go beyond 2016, however the empirical part of this article uses only the 2012–2016 survey waves. Lags in data collection and the actual election dates are reported in Table 4.

7 The overall turnout in 2015 was 51%, while in 2019 it was 62% (see Table 1). In each of the data samples per year more than 60% of respondents voted.

8 Although the dependent variable includes both the votes for PiS and Kukiz’15, as shown in Table 3, the results are driven by the votes for PiS. Dropping Kukiz’15 from the estimation did not change the size or statistical significance of coefficients from those reported in Table 8.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paulina Lenik

Paulina Lenik, Early-Stage Researcher at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London, 16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, UK. Email: [email protected]