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How does Eastern Europe contribute to the debate over EU’s democratic deficit from an electoral perspective? Does Eastern Europe challenge our theoretical understanding of what motivates European citizens to participate and express their opinions in European Parliamentary elections? While there is no overarching consensus in the academic community regarding these questions, this essay aims to illustrate how a deeper understanding of one post-communist case and a bottom-up perspective on attitudes and political behavior in one locale, Romania, allowed the researcher to delve deeper into the taken-for-granted dynamics that European citizens from the South, East, and West engage in when voting in European Parliamentary elections. The approach of “ethnographic sensibility” mentioned in the workshop’s discussions and illustrated in several contributions to this volume (see e.g. Kubik 2013; Knott 2015) constitutes then a useful starting point in deconstructing conventional knowledge. Moreover, during the process of moving up the ladder of generality and building inferences from one case study to a region, Eastern Europe still shares enough characteristics to deserve its own dummy variable, so to speak, in large-N continent-wide analyses covering the 2004 and 2009 European Parliamentary (EP) elections. Yet, as Joshua Tucker (2015) mentions in his contribution, it is unclear whether the historical legacies discussed at the workshop and further elaborated on by Grigore Pop-Eleches (2015) will continue to play a role in a priori distinguishing Eastern Europeans’ political attitudes and behaviors from other EU citizens in the South or West in future EP elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a summary of analyses addressing the changing patterns of voting behavior in post-communist Poland as a context for examination of the issue of the relationship between regions defined by history (eighteenth-century partitions, border shifts after WWII) and contemporary forms of voting behavior. In the 1990s, the dominant cleavage in Polish politics was the one between the post-Solidarity and post-communist camps, and the best predictor of voting behavior was one's religiosity. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this cleavage has been replaced by another, between the liberal, pro-European orientation and the more Euro-skeptic, populist attitudes. The empirical evidence seems to suggest that one end of the populist-liberal continuum is relatively well defined and represents the traditional system of values, which defines Polish national identity in terms of ethnic nationalism, strong attachment to Catholic dogmas, and denunciation of communism as a virtual negation of those values. The other end of this continuum is defined more by rejection of this nationalistic- Catholic "imagined community" than by any positive features. This article examines the relative role of identity-related factors (e.g., religiosity or region) and determinants based on one's socioeconomic (class) position in shaping voting patterns in the 2007 elections to the Polish Sejm and Senate. The empirical data come from a postelection survey, the Polish General Election Study 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The author argues that political opportunism, an attitude common among communist party members before 1989, turned into both the blessing and the curse for post-communist parties in Poland. Once hopeful of secure careers in the authoritarian structures of the old regime, after the regime breakdown communists found themselves in a situation where the only chance for such a career could be associated with the party reinventing itself as a player in the field of pluralist democracy. Opportunistic attitudes of communist apparatchiks and nomenklatura members were instrumental in transforming them, individually and collectively, into effective actors in market economy and competitive politics. Yet the same attitudes doomed the post-communists once the opportunities associated with access to political power opened up widely. The same people who in the 1990s were so apt in turning the rules of democratic game into their collective advantage, in the 2000s acted with a sense of impunity and lack of any consideration for political accountability that in democracies arrives at the end of any election cycle. Plagued by corruption scandals, they lost their popular base: the economically disadvantaged groups to nationalistic populists, the urbane libertarians to liberal democrats. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article discusses populism in Poland. The major political parties are the Law and Justice Party, Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland, League of Polish Families Party, Civic Platform, Polish Peasant Party, and Democratic Left Alliance/Left and Democrats. The different ideologies, the parliamentary-election campaigns, and decommunization are mentioned. The doctrines influencing Polish politics such as pro-market, anti-market, particularistic, and universalistic ideals are discussed in relation to the liberal-democratic, conservative or Christian-democratic, socialist or social-democratic, and populist movements. Statistics are given for six political parties in the parliamentary elections in 2001, 2005, and 2007.

The article presents news briefs on political science, elections, the cabinet system, political parties, and practical politics in Poland under Prime Minister Marek Belka. Presidential candidate Lech Aleksander Kaczynski defeated rival Donald Franciszek Tusk in the second round of voting for presidential elections. The parliamentary elections saw a swing of votes from left to right.

Presents an overview of the political structure of Poland in 2004. Issues in national politics, including the country's accession to the European Union; Elections to the European Parliament; Adoption of the Law on Elections to the European Parliament by the Sejm.