Abstract
In the Introduction to this special issue of the International Journal of Sociology we illustrate the centrality of the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN to empirical research on main social, economic and political phenomena that shape the social structure. POLPAN 1988–2013 is the longest continuously run panel survey in Central and Eastern Europe that focuses on changes in the social structure with individuals as the units of analysis. To date, it is the only research worldwide that collects, for a length of 25 years, life histories from a nationally-representative sample of adults, and that also opens the possibility of panel research on renewal samples of the young. Thanks to the expanded samples of young respondents, scholars can also use POLPAN for cohort analyses. We discuss the role of POLPAN also in light of its history: POLPAN started as a government-funded project in state socialist Poland, and its subsequent waves capture all pivotal moments of contemporary Poland: the post-communist transformation, the joining of the EU, and the 2008 global economic crisis and its aftermath. Thus, the panel data are uniquely suited for analyzing how individuals influence the social structure while being influenced by it. We end this Introduction with a summary of the four papers included in the Special Issue, all of which employ data from the POLPAN project.
Since the early twentieth century, social scientists in Poland have contributed rich research on social change. These studies, while grounded in major theoretical traditions such as those initiated by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, also developed in reaction to the series of major conditions and events embedded in Polish history. Milestones of this history include: integrating a society that regained independence after World War I, with problems typical of European backward societies of the 1920s and 1930s; World War II; the introduction of state socialism with its wide-ranging political consequences; agrarian reform, “forced” industrialization, and the accompanying urbanization; the post-Stalinist period and late socialism; the sweeping political, economic, and social change following the end of state socialism in 1989; and finally, the European Union era.
For Poland in 1989, the collapse of state socialism was a result of both enduring economic failures and social movement pressure. Industrial output began to decline in 1978 and continued to fall through the 1980s. It was accompanied by deteriorating standards of living. Social discontent in August 1980 fueled the creation of Solidarity, initially as a nationwide trade union, which then became a full social movement. The fall of the communist party, the Polish United Workers’ Party, from power and the ushering in of democracy and capitalism in Poland and other East European countries alike, brought new economic, social, and political problems that had to be resolved. The systemic change in 1989 and the radical reforms Poland embarked on afterward made social-class and stratification research highly salient.
In analyses of Poland’s market transition in the 1990s and early 2000s, many use the terms winners and losers. Winners successfully navigated and even prospered in the early stages of the economic restructuring; losers did not. Reality is rarely a simple dichotomy, but the winners and losers divide showed (a) the growing economic inequality after 1989, and (b) that some classes that were winners during the communist era became losers afterward.
ORIGINS AND STRUCTURE OF THE POLISH PANEL SURVEY POLPAN
Empirical research on social change in Poland after 1989 would not be possible without the quantitative sociological studies initiated during the socialist era. Beginning with the early 1970s, a number of surveys on national samples were conducted, with the aim of investigating various features of social structure. Among them are the Survey on Attitudes towards Social Inequality (1984); Career Mobility Surveys (1972, 1987, 1991); Survey on Job Conditions and Psychological Functioning (1978–80, 1992); Living Conditions Survey (1975, 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991). These studies reflected the long-standing interest of academics and politicians in understanding Poland’s emerging social structure, including inter- and intragenerational mobility patterns, the role of ascription vs. meritocracy, and exposure to risk of unemployment, among others. Polish sociology, with its prominent, often Western-trained scholars, including survey methodologists, was well-positioned early on to join international survey projects, and to create many of its own.
By the 1980s, central planning in social science was well-established. Since social structure and mobility were on the priority list of government-sanctioned studies, it prompted research teams to focus on and submit proposals for funding of these topics. The history of the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN, as it began in the late 1980s, is emblematic of the dynamic relationship between government, society, and social science investigations into stratification, class, and mobility during those times. In 1987, a research team at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN), led by Kazimierz M. Slomczynski and Henryk Domański, proposed to the government to conduct a large-scale, nationally representative, survey study of working-age Poles, to investigate stratification and mobility in contemporary Poland. The research team included Ireneusz Białecki, Krystyna Janicka Bogdan W. Mach, Zbigniew Sawiński, Joanna Sikorska, and Wojciech Zaborowski—experienced researchers with strong publication records.
Since there were many methodological issues that needed clarification to ensure the highest quality of such an ambitious project, the IFiS PAN research team also applied for state funding for a large pilot study (N = 2,000). The government financed both the pilot research, Social Structure I, and the main survey, Social Structure II—currently known as POLPAN 1988 (N = 5,817). Based on the pilot research, POLPAN 1988 included questions to facilitate measurement of major class and stratification concepts, including school career, occupational history, income, inter- and intragenerational mobility, household composition, consumer durables in the household, housing conditions, membership in organizations, as well as religion.
Both the pilot study and POLPAN 1988 were carried out under the auspices of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a prestigious and largely independent academic institution. Social scientists from the United States and from across Europe specializing in stratification, mobility, and survey methodology were on POLPAN’s advisory board. The project’s fieldwork started in 1987 and was completed in 1988. At the time of its design, POLPAN 1988 was envisioned as a cross-sectional survey on a large, nationally representative sample of working-age residents of Poland.
Given the opportunities for studying changes in the social structure after the fall of state socialism in 1989, POLPAN’s research team recognized the value of transforming POLPAN 1988 into a panel survey. Although funding was difficult to secure, Slomczynski and his team succeeded in conducting the second wave of POLPAN in 1993. POLPAN 1993 was based on a random sample of 2,500 respondents drawn from the 1988 survey, of whom 2,259 were successfully interviewed. Over time, funding agencies saw the value of continuing the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN. Since Citation2012, the Polish National Science Center has generously funded POLPAN through the Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN 1988–2013: Social Structure and Mobility project (hereafter, POLPAN Project), under a four-year Maestro grant (2011/02/A/HS6/00238) for IFiS PAN.
Data collection has taken place every five years since 1988, with the most recent round completed in 2013. In each POLPAN wave we aimed to reach the core panel. For an adequate age balance, since 1998 we have supplemented the panel with new subsamples of young cohorts. Thus, POLPAN 1998 collected information from 1,752 men and women interviewed in 1988 and 1993, as well as from a new sample of 383 people ages 21 to 30 in 1998. In 2003, panel respondents represented 87 percent (n = 1,474) of the full sample (N = 1,699), while the renewal sample equaled 225 respondents ages 21–25. POLPAN 2008 interviewed 1,805 respondents, of whom 581 were newly added individuals ages 21–25, while the rest (n = 1,224) participated in at least one previous panel wave. In 2013, the main stage of POLPAN covered 2,196 people, of whom 1,699 had participated as respondents in earlier waves, and 497 represented the young generation, ages 21 to 25. Following intensive efforts to reach all respondents who belonged to the original sample in 1988, the research team successfully increased the total number of individuals who participated in the last wave of POLPAN to 2,780, of whom 2,283 had been previously interviewed at least once.
To date, POLPAN is the only research worldwide that, over a span of 25 years, has collected the life histories of individuals from a nationally representative sample of adults, and that also opens the possibility of panel research on the renewal samples of the young. Thanks to the expanded samples of young respondents, scholars can also use POLPAN for cohort analyses.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF POLPAN TO THE STUDY OF SOCIAL CHANGE
Theories of societal transition must adress the question of how specific segments of the social structure react to social change and how the social structure influences this change. These theories depend on empirical evidence, and the foundation of sound analyses is high quality data. POLPAN offers the unique opportunity to assess the extent of within-person variation (the change within people over time) in relation to between-persons variation (differences between people over time) for a period spanning 25 years (see Slomczynski et al. Citation2016).
POLPAN facilitates a breakthrough in analyzing the hypothesis of “path-dependent” structural change, in the sense that some intergroup differences in time t have a disproportionate impact on later circumstances in time t + k, producing more pronounced differences. In the “strong” form, this means that the Matthew effect—the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer—operates in various parts of the social structure, even if it leads to inefficiencies.
One of the main innovative aspects of POLPAN is that it relies on theories that emphasize “structure” but also “agency,” and applies these theories to data that include two and a half decades in panel respondents’ lives. This enables scholars to analyze distinct features of societal segmentation in which individual biographies play an active role. Instead of debating the primacy of “structure versus agency,” analyses can focus on the capacity of individuals to act and make the choices that are reflected in biographies, and determined, to some extent (which can be measured), by structural conditions.
POLPAN aims to provide an overall profile of the social structure of Polish society—including subjective perceptions and objective conditions—updated every five years. To do so, it covers a variety of key topics. These include respondents’ socioeconomic characteristics together with self-reported information about spouses’ and parents’ demographics, respondents’ occupational careers, lifestyle choices, and opinions on political, economic, and social issues, among others. Recent waves of POLPAN also include a 10-item subset of the nonverbal Raven test, which captures intellectual flexibility, and respondents’ self-evaluation of physical and mental health (Nottingham Health Profile). With POLPAN, scholars can analyze various dimensions of social inequality throughout the life course.
ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE
The four articles in this issue employ the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN to analyze social, economic and political dimensions of Polish society and change therein. They show the possibilities that POLPAN opens for future scholarship.
Occupational Careers and Job Interruptions
To construct occupational trajectories scholars need information about people’s jobs—starting and ending points, as well as instances of interruptions. Breaks occur due to unemployment, illness, parental leave, caring for adult family members, full-time household duties, serving in the military, being in prison, and other reasons. Both men and women experience career interruptions, although not always for the same reasons. Zbigniew Sawiński presents the opportunities and limitations of using POLPAN 1988–2013 in research on career trajectories. He poses two problems of studying occupational trajectories with panel data: (a) holding more than one job at the same time, and (b) varied coding of the same job in different panel waves. His solution involves setting the trajectory based on occupational scales (POLPAN contains six types), including socioeconomic index (SEI), scale of job complexity, scale of educational requirements, and scales based on prestige. In addition, he proposes selecting the most accurate job at each point of time using an original five-step algorithm.
Sawiński uses three time metrics to describe career trajectories: calendar year, age of the respondent, and subsequent career year, starting from the very first job. The POLPAN data are shown in each of these metrics, with a discussion of benefits and limitations related to their use in studying careers.
Next, the article shows how data on career trajectories can be supplemented by data about job interruptions. A separate section discusses Converter-2015, a computer application that allows scholars to export POLPAN data in one of three formats: wide, long, and “presentation” formats. The latter was developed by Sawiński to help researchers identify patterns of job careers. The study ends with a discussion of data quality issues in POLPAN.
Fixed-Term Employment, Psychological Distress, and Occupational Position
Anna Kiersztyn analyzes the past two waves of the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN, 2008 and 2013, to understand adjustment to the labor market during the period of the global economic crisis. In past years, many studies have attempted to assess the relationship between contractual status and a range of well-being outcomes, including self-reported health status or psychological distress. These studies have generally failed to establish a conclusive, straightforward link between working on a fixed-term contract and subjective quality of life.
In light of these results, Kiersztyn pays attention to the heterogeneity of temporary jobs, in terms of working conditions and the career prospects they offer. She examines the occupational differences in the effects of fixed-term employment on the psychological condition of workers, bringing together two separate lines of research: on the psychological consequences of fixed-term employment and the structural and institutional determinants of the wage effects and career consequences of temporary jobs. Empirical results offer important insights into the complex links between employment flexibility and occupational inequalities on the Polish labor market.
Educational and Occupational Homophily
Zbigniew Karpiński builds on recent work on the so-called Matthew effect by Slomczynski et al. (Citation2007) to examine educational and occupational homophily in marital and friendship relations in Poland. Karpiński applies a novel conceptual framework to POLPAN to obtain estimates of homophily for the different characteristics and relations, and tests hypotheses specifying a link between the amount of homophily and the overall degree of inequality. The conceptual framework models homophily in terms of the probability that a member of a given group rejects an out-group member as an associate. The hypotheses and theoretical argument derive from status and exchange theories.
Empirical analyses suggest that there has been some change in the degree of homophily, but the magnitude of that change depends on the distance separating the categories: while the estimates of the rejection probabilities for relations between distant categories are more or less stable across the period under study, Karpiński finds a decrease in homophily in social associations between categories that are close to one another in the social hierarchy.
New Models of Economic Voting during the Postcommunist Era
Michal Kotnarowski evaluates the extent to which the transitional economic voting model that Tucker (Citation2006) developed to explain voting behavior in young postcommunist democracies of Europe applied to 1990s Poland. According to Tucker, voting behavior depends on the transitional identity of the political parties and voters’ status as winners or losers of the transition. Using the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN and its data on the 1993 and 1998 parliamentary elections, Kotnarowski distinguishes economic winners and losers of transformation by tracing the individual socioeconomic situation of the same respondents through time. He finds that the political situation in Poland during the first years after the transition was not so unstable and chaotic for voters as Tucker assumed. Interestingly, Kotnarowski finds little empirical support for the transitional economic voting model in the first years after transition. Winners did not have a higher propensity to vote for reformist parties, and losers were not more likely to vote for old-regime parties.
CONCLUSION
The articles in this issue belong to the rich body of research that the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN 1988–2013 has generated over decades. POLPAN is strongly anchored in theoretical innovations surrounding analyses of social structure and its change, as well as in the most up-to-date survey methodology. It is not surprising that, since the realease of its 1988 wave, over 150 publications in Polish and English employ the POLPAN data.
In 2000 a line of English language POLPAN books began that includes Social Patterns of Being Political: The Initial Phase of the Post-Communist Transition in Poland (Slomczynski Citation2000), Social Structure: Changes and Linkages: The Advanced Phase of the Post-Communist Transition in Poland (Slomczynski Citation2002), and Continuity and Change in Social Life: Structural and Psychological Adjustment in Poland (Slomczynski and Marquart-Pyatt Citation2007), Dynamics of Social Structure: Poland’s Transformative Years, 1988–2013 (Slomczynski et al. Citation2016), and Social Inequality and the Life Course: Poland’s Transformative Years, 1988–2013 (Slomczynski and Wysmułek Citation2016). In addition, two issues of the International Journal of Sociology were published on POLPAN: Structural Constraints, Gender, and Images of Inequality;: The Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN 1988–2008 (Slomczynski and Tomescu-Dubrow Citation2012) and Sociodemographic Differentiation in a Dynamic Perspective: The Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN 1988–2008 (Slomczynski and Tomescu-Dubrow Citation2013). These books and journals showcase the great variety of topics that researchers can delve into using POLPAN, such as status attainment and social mobility, political attitudes and behaviors, social conflicts and images of inequality, marital and friendship patterns, religiosity, health issues, and many others.
This issue of the International Journal of Sociology also connects directly to those books featuring POLPAN data that focus specifically on social and economic phenomena of the social structure—labor markets, occupational careers and mobility, economic and educational attainment, economic inequality, and social class. Among them is Sociological Tools Measuring Occupations: New Classification and Scales (Domański, Sawiński, and Slomczynski Citation2009), on the measurement of social class, occupational standing, status, and position within the stratification system. This book provides quantitative scales of occupational prestige and socioeconomic status as well as scales of skill requirements and work complexity. The other, Dynamic Class and Stratification in Poland (Tomescu-Dubrow et al. forthcoming), is about long-term changes to the social structure and presents the thesis that class and stratification should always be treated as analytically distinct, though related, phenomena.
We invite readers to reach out to the numerous POLPAN-related resources, many of which are available free of charge on the project’s Web site, polpan.org. Here you can access detailed information on the design and methodology of POLPAN, including questionnaires, in both Polish and English. The POLPAN 1988–2013 data are archived at the Polish Social Data Archive, and will be available at GESIS–Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Those interested can receive the POLPAN data by contacting the project administrators directly.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Irina Tomescu-Dubrow
Irina Tomescu-Dubrow is an associate professor of sociology at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), and program manager for the Cross-national Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training program (CONSIRT) of The Ohio State University (OSU) and PAN. She studies social inequality, stratification and structural change and is involved in cross-national methodology research, including ex-post survey data harmonization.
Kazimierz M. Slomczynski
Kazimierz M. Slomczynski is a professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also director of the Cross-National Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training program (CONSIRT) of The Ohio State University and the Polish Academy of Sciences. Maciek is principal investigator of the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN, conducted every five years since 1988, and directs other studies, including a project on ex-post harmonization of cross-national surveys.
REFERENCES
- Domański, Henryk, Zbigniew Sawiński, and Kazimierz M. Slomczynski 2009. Sociological Tools Measuring Occupations: New Classification and Scales. Warsaw: IFiS.
- Slomczynski, Kazimierz M. ed. 2000. Social Patterns of Being Political: The Initial Phase of the Post-Communist Transition in Poland. Warsaw: IFiS.
- Slomczynski, Kazimierz M. ed. 2002. Social Structure: Changes and Linkages: The Advanced Phase of the Post-Communist Transition in Poland. Warsaw: IFiS.
- Slomczynski, Kazimierz M., Krystyna Janicka, Goldie Shabad, and Irina Tomescu-Dubrow. 2007. “Changes in Class Structure in Poland, 1988–2003: Crystallization of the Winners–Losers’ Divide.” Pp. 24–46 in Continuity and Change in Social Life: Structural and Psychological Adjustment in Poland, edited by Kazimierz M. Słomczyński and Sandra T. Marquart-Pyatt. Warsaw: IFiS.
- Slomczynski, Kazimierz M., and Sandra Marquart-Pyatt eds. 2007. Continuity and Change in Social Life: Structural and Psychological Adjustment in Poland. Warsaw: IFiS.
- Slomczynski, Kazimierz M., and Irina Tomescu-Dubrow eds. 2012. “Structural Constraints, Gender, and Images of Inequality: The Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN 1988–2008.” International Journal of Sociology 42(1), 3–107.
- Slomczynski, Kazimierz M., and Irina Tomescu-Dubrow eds. 2013. “Sociodemographic Differentiation in a Dynamic Perspective: The Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN 1988–2008.” International Journal of Sociology 42(4), 3–125.
- Slomczynski, Kazimierz M., and Irina Tomescu-Dubrow with Danuta Życzyńska-Ciołek, and Ilona Wysmułek eds. 2016. Dynamics of Social Structure: Poland’s Transformative Years, 1988–2013. Warsaw: IFiS.
- Slomczynski, Kazimierz M., and Ilona Wysmułek eds. 2016. Social Inequality and the Life Course: Poland’s Transformative Years, 1988–2013. Warsaw: IFiS.
- Tomescu-Dubrow, Irina, Kazimierz M. Slomczynski, Henryk Domański, Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow, Zbigniew Sawiński, and Dariusz Przybysz. Forthcoming. Dynamic Class and Stratification in Poland. Budapest: CEU Press.
- Tucker, Joshua A. 2006. Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, 1990–1999. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.