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Large proportions of spoilt ballots may lead to a distortion of election results. While invalid votes are sometimes meaningful political acts, reflecting political protest, spoilt ballot papers may also be a consequence of voter error, which can be attributed to the poor design of a ballot paper. In this study, we focus on the widely publicized case of the Polish local elections of 2014. These elections saw unprecedentedly large proportions of spoilt votes, and ballot paper format was often mentioned as a potential culprit. Yet it remains largely unclear whether or not there indeed does exist a cause-and-effect relationship between ballot card format and the tendency of voters to cast invalid votes. We argue that what we deliver here is the first methodologically refined test of the aforementioned hypothesis. We apply the generalized synthetic control comparative method, proposed by Yiquing Xu (in 2017), and show that the implementation of a complex or ambiguous ballot design can result in a substantial increase in the rate of spoilt votes. We thus demonstrate that ballot paper design matters. Specifically, the results of this study corroborate the existence of a cause-and-effect relationship between ballot paper format and the fraction of invalid votes in the 2014 municipal elections in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction to the selection of the papers presented at a two-day workshop “The End of the Story?” Problems and Perspectives of East European Literary Studies,” held at Princeton University on 8–9 February 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The postscript reports on the conference and comments on what the papers and audience participation tell us about the state of the field and Poland’s struggle to come to terms with its past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thirty years after communism's demise, Polish civil society is, decidedly, self-sustaining, and wide-ranging, with activism focused on various issues, from the natural environment to education reform to reproductive rights. This paper uses data from interviews and a nationally representative survey to explore the evolution of activism in Poland and specifically the claim that Polish citizens are more likely to engage in civic action when these efforts concern everyday social problems, rather than abstract political ideals. We argue that since 2015, the Polish government is, indeed, attempting to direct civil society's growth and development, thereby shrinking the space for activism, especially for liberal, progressive organizations. Yet, this is only a part of a more complex and interesting picture of activism that is also shifting, with individuals focusing on new issues and mobilization tactics, and strengthening through the creation of networks, and groups that work on different sectors but join forces. Thus, although some citizens are mobilizing around local, social concerns, intangible, political issues remain important, with Poles participating in activities online and in person to defend the rule of law and judicial freedom. Polish citizens are also regularly protesting limitations on reproductive rights and in support of gay rights. Thirty years of change and democracy in Poland have produced a dynamic and diverse civil society that is, simultaneously, shrinking, shifting, and strengthening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tragic events of 10 April 2010 became one of the most important topics of public discourse in Poland. They remain its central issue until today. This paper is an attempt to investigate one aspect of the phenomenon: the impact of the disaster and subsequent events on the presidential election of 2010. It is based on the results of research carried out within the Polish National Election Study (PNES) project. At least three reasons make it plausible that the Smolensk catastrophe had a great impact on Polish politics. Firstly, the disaster had legal and constitutional consequences; the sudden death of a head of state always generates a number of specific actions, policy changes, and (most importantly from the perspective of this paper) determines the election calendar. Secondly, the disaster had psychological consequences; it caused a strong psychological shock for participants in the political process, which redefined political competition, public discourse, and the media coverage. Thirdly, narratives about the events preceding the crash and following it quickly became an important element of Polish politics, especially in the media and in the electoral campaign. The main finding of the paper is that the Smolensk catastrophe did not produce a fundamental change in the political preferences and voting patterns of Polish citizens. At both the aggregate and individual level we observe relative stability in voter turnout patterns and voting preferences. The paper also finds that the catastrophe strengthened existing preferences and behavior patterns, and it petrified existing divisions. This paper is a study of voting behavior in extreme situations. It analyses a unique phenomenon—voting during a huge social trauma and right afterwards. Thus, in addition to the idiographic objective of the paper (explanation of voting behavior in the 2010 presidential election in Poland), it also has a nomothetic aspect, because it contributes to the theoretical discussions about voting behavior in traumatic, exceptional situations. It can serve as a reference point for future studies addressing the issue of electoral behavior in unexpected, unusual contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a framework to analyze the varying understanding of democratic developments. Based on the theory of frame-analysis, it distinguishes six brackets within which democratic developments can be interpreted. This framework is applied to identify the nature of international rankings of domestic democracy and to compare the framing of developments in Polish democracy in reports on democratic developments from international organizations. The conclusion is that sense-making of democratic developments in general varies enormously, and that this is also visible in the international rankings of democracy. Democratic developments in Poland are also assessed in different ways, resulting in varying claims about the nature of the developments in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article offers a new framework for understanding the early East European post-war that introduces and conceptualizes the idea of "Void Communities." The core of the argument is that the disappearance of various groups of Others—ethnic, religious, and class—was one of the most important consequences of the Second World War for Central and Eastern Europe, and particularly for Poland and Ukraine. The Void left by those who had disappeared could be described on several levels, such as physical absence, social and economical dysfunctionality, transformation of the social structure and stratification, property transfer, decline of moral values and norms, and changes in local culture and traditions. Based on an extensive oral history research (of more than 150 interviews) and in-depth reading of ego documents, the article prioritizes the first-hand perspective of witnesses and centres on those who remained in the post-war Void Communities after their neighbours had been murdered, deported, resettled, or encouraged to leave semi-voluntarily. While the paper primarily focuses on the historical region of Galicia, now divided between Poland and Ukraine, the source material used to analyze the framework for Void Communities includes documents associated with the entire pre-war Polish Second Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the pro-market rhetoric of the early phase of the post-communist transformation in Poland. It looks at one case of such rhetoric, that of the Warsaw daily Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading Polish paper medium. Gazeta was an unequivocal supporter of the market transition and perhaps the country’s most important pro-market opinion-forming platform. In order to convince its readership, it argued, in a vein similar to that of the early nineteenth-century classical economists, that this was the only way to achieve an efficient economy but that, in the short run, social costs and suffering were unavoidable. In its rhetoric, it stressed logic and rationality as characteristics of the reform projects, while often using irony in reporting differing views. Critical voices it treated as either naïve or representing the vested interests of those opposing the reforms. The Gazeta editors and authors were in favor of rapid reforms, afraid that pain and suffering would mobilize resistance. They believed that the sooner the economic rebuilding process succeeded, the greater support there would be for the reforms. The danger they were most afraid of was right-wing, nationalist populism. Ironically, the type of policies they advocated, while economically successful, actually contributed to marginalization and social exclusion. Thus, as an overview of East-Central Europe politics shows, in the longer term they led exactly to what Gazeta was most afraid of. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article has two main objectives. First, it proposes an analytical framework for how to explore "narratives of return" as policy proposals and tools of memory politics. Second, it reveals coexisting versions of "return" advocated by three Polish political actors: the populist right-wing Law and Justice party ("Return" to the Nation), Catholic activists ("Return" to Religion), and representatives of liberal feminism ("Return" to Women's Rights). The case material consists of four policy proposals relating to either family or women's reproductive rights. The article shows that all analyzed political narratives of return have used some variation of the discourse on victimhood, and all of them mean to terrify and raise fear. The policy proposals draw on Polish collective memory and, specifically, on the politics of memory of the post-1989 transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a modest attempt is undertaken to connect the rational choice theory mechanism with the sociological theory of voting, as efforts to juxtapose both theories are still rare, although some cited accomplishments offer interesting insights. Our dependent variable is participation in a local election in Poland. The local government elections in Poland seem to offer a setting particularly well-suited for a test of the rational choice hypothesis and its relation to sociological explanations of voting behavior. The essential contribution of the article derives from our conviction that social embeddedness and rooting into the social milieu and local community matter for both the cost of participating in a local election and the cost of deciding whether to participate. In the world of post-cleavage politics, individualization of political behavior and involvement in (new) social networks play an increasingly important role. The general finding can be summarized as follows: the social embeddedness of citizens does enhance the probability of participation in an election; however, it does not substitute for the impact of rational motivation factors, nor does it significantly decrease the latter's net impact on our dependent variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who gets to benefit from failure is a hot topic in recent research on science and innovation. This article articulates the phenomenon of failure privilege on the terrain of public policy, that is, circumstantial and institutionally ingrained dispositions to use policy downfalls, derailments, and crises as resources of policy action, tools of integration, and dynamism. Building on analyses of policy failures, the article advances a typology of three forms of privilege: exploitation, (in)visibilization, and projection of policy futures. It brings illustrations from abortion policymaking in Poland. Here, failure privilege interacts with a bio-political and culturally polarized setting that further blends neoliberal mechanisms of failing with post-Communist transformation of cultures of failure. This leads to the argument that exploitation and controversial interventions in public policy demand legitimacy that is today constructed by advancing imaginaries and models of failure that allow actors to both visibilize new futures and advance a policy stalemate. Failure is a powerful resource of integration and even surveillance, as well as a factor furthering the politics of waiting. Redefining it is a crucial policy win and entails complex and implicit mechanisms impacting policy agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 30 December 1922, Eligiusz Niewiadomski, the murderer of Poland’s first president, Gabriel Narutowicz, was tried and sentenced to death. The execution was duly carried out on 31 January 1923. The trial of Niewiadomski was one of the most important and galvanizing judicial proceedings in the history of the Second Republic. According to the historiography, Niewiadomski was universally perceived as a “lunatic” or “madman” and his actions were a political setback and embarrassment for the Polish radical right. During the trial, Niewiadomski evinced no contrition for his crime and claimed that his deed was the expression of “the conscience and offended dignity of the nation.” In this article, I will present the argument that shortly after his trial, the right wing publicists’ and politicians’ judgment of Niewiadomski underwent a profound transformation. Far from being condemned as a “madman” or “murderer,” Niewiadomski assumed the position of a “tragic hero” who may have broken the letter of the law but who had done so in the name of just principles, which deserved recognition and approval. The pivotal event in this transformation was the rabidly anti-Semitic speech delivered by Niewiadomski during his trial. The paper analyzes the coverage of the trial and execution in the press in order to arrive at an understanding of precisely how the Polish right was able to reclaim Niewiadomski as one of its own so quickly despite his grave crime. It also analyzes the meaning of this transformation and its significance for understanding the nationalist right in Poland and, more broadly, interwar Polish politics as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to recall one of the first pieces of anthropological fieldwork carried out in Europe. It was supervised by Bronisław Malinowski and carried out by Feliks Gross (1906–2006). He had been a young Cracovian lawyer of Jewish descent and socialist activist interested in sociology and anthropology, who was preparing for an academic career. This turned out to be impossible because of the growing wave of anti-Semitism in Europe. Gross became a student and collaborator of his Cracovian compatriot, then a London professor, Bronisław Malinowski, who advised him to make a “survey of the ghetto” in their hometown. The research progressed promisingly, but was halted by the outbreak of the Second World War. Gross managed to escape to Vilna, where he tried to continue his research. He finally landed safely in the United States, where he met his mentor and encouraged him to engage in political activity. The Cracovian project is described using the correspondence between Malinowski and Gross, as well as other archival material. It is shown against the political and academic background, together with the important theoretical and methodological frameworks of the time. Thus, the unsuccessful project becomes a very informative case of the working of the academic “field,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term. There are also other examples of European research supervised by Malinowski, who, therefore, deserves the title of a predecessor of the “anthropology at home.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The post-colonial face of Poland is rather problematic. Nationalistic right-wingers started using interpretations applying the post-colonial theory, and the theory itself seems to put little resistance to this type of appropriation. Rather than acknowledging such state of affairs as the fate of every idea falling into the hands of the natives, in this paper I would like to treat the problems of Polish post-coloniality as a very interesting test, both for the theory itself and for the analyses of the Polish reality. I shall compare the cases of nationalistic misuse with a more "mainstream" approach to the issue of applicability of the post-colonial theory to the situation in Eastern Europe, and particularly to the situation in Poland. As I shall try to demonstrate, this comparison will reveal many disturbingly common threads--which in my opinion are unjustified assertions and conclusions--resulting not only from errors in reasoning but the shortcomings of the theory itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the subject of the Polish-Jewish postwar relations, this paper deals with the pathology of public discourse known as the “conspiracies of silence” phenomenon (see Eviatar Zerubavel, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life , 2008). The concept in question may be applied to the Polish historic conditions. It helps to problematize the circumstances in which social conspiracies were accumulating around the Polish-Jewish relations in the postwar period so as to pave the way for analysis of the current difficulties in researching the title issues, particularly those that emerged while using a quantitative and qualitative approach to research Polish attitudes toward Jews. The resulting polemical analysis is made on the basis of a text by one of the most renowned Polish sociologists, Prof. Antoni Sułek. His lecture titled “Ordinary Poles Looking at Jews” was delivered at the University of Warsaw, Poland, on 17 December 2009, within the cycle “Ten Lectures for a New Millennium.” It summarises the Polish twenty-year poll-based researches of Poles’ attitudes towards Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Patronage is central to Polish party politics. The power of a governing party to appoint its supporters to positions in public and semi-public spheres will be examined in this paper. The two governments under investigation are: the center—left coalition government of the Democratic Left Alliance, the Labour Union, and the Polish Peasant Party formed in October 2001 and the center—right minority government of the Law and Justice party formed in October 2005. A significant extent of party patronage was expected in the case of the Democratic Left Alliance, which confirmed a dominant party thesis. However, in the case of Law and Justice, party patronage was expected to be hindered by party competition. This has not been the case, which challenges two arguments put forward by Grzymała-Busse that the dispersion of parliamentary power constrains party patronage and that in Poland the general pattern is that of decreasing rent-seeking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author, against the background of Communist Studies developed in Poland since World War I, reconstructs theoretical orientations that explained the communist system in that country. In this paper, the division of theoretical approaches into political, economic, and cultural ones is proposed. Each of them seeks factors responsible for nature, evolution, and final decline of the communist system in a different sphere of social life. An approach of the political type was Leszek Nowak's theory of communism as a system of emancipated political power; of the economic type—Jadwiga Staniszkis's theory of the communist system as incomplete capitalism; and of the cultural type— Michał Buchowski's conceptualization of communism as a system of new religion. In the final part, the author considers complementary character of reconstructed approaches and analyzes reasons why some of reconstructed theories did not generate schools of thought in Polish social sciences after 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyse the archival collection of the memoirs of officers of the Polish security forces (Security Office and Citizens' Militia) on their service in the Warsaw voivodeship in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Entangled in political violence, they were chief actors of the top-down "revolution in the county" and bottom-up "county revolution" that overlapped in Central Europe after the Second World War. This article presents their accounts as examples of fulfilment of a "narrative command" to present a vision of the past in line with the official ideological scripts of the Polish People's Republic. At the same time, though, the approach employed here does not deprive the authors of their authorial subjectivity, and highlights their agency in attempting to express their individual agendas, interpretations, and emotions. This article distinguishes two types of accounts with reference to their perspective, structure, and language: "from a bird's-eye view" and "a frog's-eye" narrative, as well as one peculiar case of "an aspiring writer." Then, in its main part, the article analyses how veterans reconstructed and interpreted various experiences related to their service in the 1940s and 1950s. The issues are the following: becoming an officer and transformation from "peasant" to "guardsman," participation in violence and coercion, alcohol drinking, and possible fields of political criticism expressed by the officers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The secret police, along with the political apparatus of a ruling party or administration, created the backbone of communist regimes and constituted the main tool of State violence. The state of the art within studies on the Polish security apparatus—albeit extremely rich—is entirely focused on archival documents. What is missing from the research on the secret police in Poland is an oral history approach. This article is a pioneer attempt at revealing the operative methods of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB) through interviews with former officers. It aims at reconstructing the mechanism that led the officers to victimize dissidents and how they created moral justifications for their deeds. Asking about their career track, successes and failures, relationships with other officers, private life, and details of daily duty, I tried to glean what made the interviewees become perpetrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how Forum Against Depression, 1 an online platform devoted to depression, creates awareness about depression in Poland. This qualitative study uses critical discourse analysis to interpret texts published by the Forum and a short film, Disappearing Children, devoted to "teenage depression." In this discourse, depression is presented as an object, the meaning of which is stable and dispersed. The article shows how the creation of this double semiosis of depression provides an invitation for auto-diagnosis and blurs the identity of the sender: the pharmaceutical company running the campaign, which is the subject of this article. Neuro-tivization of depression conceals the social context of distress and helps maximize drug sales. Ultimately, this article tracks the merging of complex psychiatrization and depsychiatrization processes. The article enhances discussion about issues related to biomedical framings of mental health, diagnostic reification of mental health diagnoses, and debate about conditions in which mental health knowledge is produced in Poland and globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the significant body of literature on migrations after the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union, including on social remittances, a subcategory—political remittances—is only now starting to receive attention. This article, based on thirty-four interviews with Poles active in the transnational space between Poland and Ireland, supplemented by a survey of Poles in Ireland (n = 503) and a press query, aims to investigate (broadly defined) political remittances. It explores the conditions in the country of origin and destination which facilitate or hinder political remittances, the areas of political remittances Polish migrants to or from Ireland transfer, and how these are transmitted. The remittances are found to concern three main areas: (1) the perception of minorities (ethnic, national, sexual); (2) the transparency of government and closeness of representatives to citizens; and (3) the cooperation between the authorities and other actors to achieve local economic development. The article argues that political remitting in the Polish-Irish transnational space can be treated as an example of much broader phenomena taking place between countries of the European Union, especially those linked by large migration waves. It demonstrates that, contrary to what much of the literature suggests, political remitting does not only take place between countries at very different stages of economic and political development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the importance of right-wing populist parties (RPPs) has grown significantly in Europe, with some even forming governments, the attendant political and policy programs are attracting greater attention. However, to date most of the relevant research has been focused on the core slogan policies of RPPs, relating to immigration and the economy. This has left the parties' educational policies understudied. In seeking to address this situation, we analyse changes in the citizenship-education curricula that Poland's schools pursued during the years 2017 to 2022, with the country's ruling party (Law and Justice — PiS), thus offering a case study of a typical RPP. This article scrutinizes citizenship-education curricular changes pursued by PiS —with an approach that regards this as the field that best allows the desire to reconstruct the model of citizenship to be discerned. We also explore a process of "civic de-socialization," and the new system of values being put in place in the curricula, by the Polish government. We examine whether the new provisions this entails fit into the ideological system of right-wing populists, and we conclude by developing hypotheses, and seeking to conclude theoretically, that ideological radicalization in education is being observed, in the wake of years of rule by an RPP. Interesting in this regard is the finding that more profound changes were not put into effect until a second stage to the reforms was reached. Overall, the case of the curriculum pursued in Poland by PiS points to a new ontology of citizenship, more nativism, and an anti-progressive agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I adopt the following hypothesis: the prison system in Poland of 1944–1956 was the effect of an imposed legal framework and administrative regulations that demoralized and destroyed the personal value system of the prison staff. I study the behavior of wardens in a situation of constant pressure and ideological control. I ask who were the people who created the prison system in Poland and how the penal system absorbed and shaped them. I use documents from the collection of the Prison Management Department of the Ministry of Public Security and the Central Prison Administration of the Ministry of Interior. I confront the emerging picture of attitudes and behaviors of prison officers with behavioral models developed by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo based on their experiments conducted in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. In the first section, I present the legal and organizational issues of the prison system and the recruitment process for its employees. Next, I present the scope of professional and ideological formation of new staff and analyze the consequences of such preparation for the functions of a prison officer. In the following paragraphs, I reflect on what strategies of discomfort repression did the officers in Stalinist penal institutions assume. Moreover, I consider the scope and sources of their violence toward prisoners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shrinking of civil society—a problematic trend in a growing number of countries—often involves enacting legal measures to curtail the activity of civil society organizations and vilifying and/or harassing such organizations. Poland has been at the forefront of this trend since 2015. This article examines the mechanisms promoting elite replacement in Polish civil society, with a specific focus on the ways in which civil society actors have responded to these changes and the effectiveness of the state's efforts to establish new hierarchies of power. The article discusses the complex relation between research on civil society and elite theory, and examines the anti-elitist discourses concerning Polish civil society and the strategies employed by the state to gain more control over the third sector. Next, the analytical section focuses on the ways in which civil society actors respond to state-sponsored elite change and examines three types of relations between the state and NGOs in contemporary Poland: (1) resistance, (2) assimilation, and (3) opportunistic synergy. In closing, the article shows ways in which analyses of the transformation of civil society in Poland and other countries can be enriched by drawing on elite theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows the results of empirical research conducted among members of advisory councils operating in Polish cities. The study covers five types of councils: councils of NGOs, senior citizen councils, councils for residents with disabilities, labor market councils, and sports councils. The author focuses mainly on advisory council members who are also NGO representatives. Thus, they have a twofold role: a member of a collegial advisory body, which is supposed to consult local authorities, and a representative of an NGO. The article aims to reveal the motives for engaging NGOs' representatives in social council activities. Considering the specific character of the NGO sector in Poland, one may expect that membership within social councils will become an arena for pushing the interests of NGOs. However, research results show that the motivations for involvement in social council activities do not have clientelistic patterns. The members of the councils are motivated by similar factors as in other forms of prosocial activity, which may be divided into normative, rational, and affiliative-prestigious. Council members are aware of their double role. They, therefore, distance themselves from the possibility of achieving individual (private) benefits or benefits for the NGO they are associated with. Their membership in councils is motivated primarily by a sense of duty to the group or the organization they represent or local authorities, taking part in the decision-making, and being a member of the prestigious group of experts they consider advisory councils to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the party alignment bias in Poland. Relying on quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design and 2006–2019 data for over 2,400 municipalities, we aim to establish whether the impact of political alignment on the distribution of grants from the central to the local governments has increased under the rules of populist, authoritarian government. We report robust evidence that provides an affirmative answer to this question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most issues that come before the Council of the European Union are decided without any recorded opposition. Constructivist literature explains that informal norms encourage state officials to conduct negotiations according to the standards of compromise and restraint. I argue that another mechanism may help explain consensus: state representatives must convince their ministerial superiors to support the agreements they reach. Effectively, rather than just representing their capitals in one of the Council's bodies, they speak to their political principals on behalf of their colleagues. This article presents the results of theory-oriented process-tracing research. It describes how the causal mechanisms leading to consensus can be conceptualized and operationalized. It shows the results of testing the existence of their observable implications in a material gathered through in-depth interviews with Council officials from Poland, who can be seen as a "least likely" case of informal norms socialization but who, at the same time, are rarely the focus of analysis in the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a systematic analysis of three databases of court decisions and a comprehensive overview of out-of-court use of cultural expertise in dispute resolution across various institutional contexts, this article investigates how Polish authorities tackle emerging issues of cultural diversity. Although Poland remains one of the European Union's (EU) most ethnically and culturally homogeneous countries, increased immigration and internal pluralism bring new challenges for the courts and other public institutions involved in dispute resolution. Increasingly, generic references and commonsense understandings are replaced by more precise indications of sources, uses of academic sources or reports by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and appointment of relevant experts. On the other hand, judges still tend to attempt their own interpretations and usually reject motions to instruct social scientists as expert witnesses, choosing the approach once aptly described as "strategic ignorance."2 Thus, in this article, I look at how Polish courts justify instruction (or rejection of motions to instruct) social scientists as expert witnesses and where they draw the line between common sense and expert interpretations of culture. I also survey the rising demand for cultural expertise in dispute settlement in immigration services, detention centers, the military, and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how the 2020 Polish Presidential election was affected by the recent COVID-19 pandemic in the context of global democratic backsliding. Specifically, this article examines how the incumbency advantage of President Andrzej Duda was bolstered during the pandemic by the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS). Although PiS was unable to carry out every planned electoral manipulation, the party nonetheless helped Duda secure a second term in office in a historically close election. On the one hand, this article illustrates that while many of the tactics undertaken by PiS were within the limits of the letter of the law, its actions still undermined the spirit of Polish democracy. On the other hand, this article also contributes to the literature on democratic backsliding by underscoring the fact that the election in Poland was free and fair, which makes this regime qualitatively different from other cases in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the Soviet nationality policy in Belarus in 1944–1947 during the population exchange between the Soviet Union and Poland. Unlike in Lithuania and Ukraine, the authorities in Belarus prioritized keeping the labor force over national homogenization, determined nationality by territory of birth, and attempted to keep the people by designating them as Belarusians irrespective of their self-identification. The article argues that in Belarus, the population transfer was a combination of an exodus of refugees with the expulsion of Poles by the state. Although the declarations about the voluntary character of the resettlement were false, the direction of the compulsion varied, and this ambivalence opened up a space of limited autonomy in which the people could exercise agency. The Soviet ethnic cleansing remained incomplete in Soviet Belarus because of the competing urge to keep the labor force. Paradoxically, much of the demographic de-Polonization of new western territories of Soviet Belarus was achieved without the state's commitment to ethnic cleansing and without the involvement of Belarusian nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are only two European Union (EU) states where hard coal is still mined: Poland and the Czech Republic. One of the key interest groups in the hard coal mining industry are trade unions. They are particularly strong in this sector, almost entirely controlled by the state, in Poland—without their approval, it is in fact impossible to implement any significant reforms. The main goal of the article is to explain the influence of trade unions operating in the hard coal mining sector in Poland and the Czech Republic on the results of the reforms of this sector carried out in 2015–2019. The framework for empirical analysis is the theoretical output on interest groups and the power resources approach. Measuring the influence of an interest group on the decision-making process is one of the greatest challenges in research on interest groups. However, the empirical analysis allows us to conclude that the purposes of mining trade unions both in Poland and in the Czech Republic were consistent, that the shape of the reforms introduced in 2015–2019 was convergent with these goals, and that the activity of trade unions had a very big impact on these reforms. However, in the long run, hard coal mining in Europe is in decline and trade unions are only trying to stop what is inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing consensus within both policy and academic circles, including various schools of political, legal, and economic thought, that institutions matter and that the quality of institutions and governments makes an important difference for economic development. However, while the institutional literature has extensively discussed different types of institutions and their importance, only a few quantitative measures of formal institutions and their quality are available. What is more, most analyses referring to the quality of public institutions concern the national or regional level and the issue at the local level is relatively understudied. The purpose of the article is to fill this gap in two ways. The first one is to identify territorial differentiation of the quality of public institutions at the local level in Poland; the second one, to explain the reasons of the differentiation of institutional capacities in the context of historical, cultural, and social factors. The research has shown that the quality of public institutions is highly related to historical circumstances. However, although their impact is strong, the historical conditions are definitely not the only factor influencing local institutional capital in Poland, as they appear to be deeply affected also by the level of urbanization and the degree of human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why have Polish state institutions constructed an official public memory of martial law (1981–1983) despite plural interpretations and growing apathy and amnesia in the broader society? Between 1992 and 2018, parliament passed eight commemorative resolutions endorsing a single interpretation of martial law as treason. This political consensus is surprising given not only the lack of social consensus but also the political polarization that existed between and among post-communist and post-Solidarity parties. Drawing on LaClau and Mouffe's discourse theory as well as Brian Grodsky's theory of transitional justice measures as political goods, this article analyzes the official discourse of martial law as articulated in commemorative resolutions, transcripts of parliamentary deliberations, parliamentary journals, court rulings, and reports of committees, subcommittees, special commissions, and governmental offices. It considers how this discourse has been deployed to legitimate the ruling elite, attack political rivals, and justify controversial initiatives, policies, and reforms. It contributes to the literature on the politics of memory during times of political transformation by examining a case of surprising stability despite factors that would seem to favor change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant element of Central and Eastern Europe's democracies backsliding process turns out to be changes in the media law. These changes are now leading to a decline in media freedom. The article attempts to understand this phenomenon by analyzing the process of legal and policy changes in Poland. In the course of the analysis, the reader's attention is drawn to three elements that form the mainline of events related to the weakening of media freedom. These are, in turn, (a) the takeover of public media by influencing the staffing of media companies, (b) introducing a new, completely politicized body into the legal order, which duplicates the already existing and partially politicized media authority, and (c) exerting economic and legal pressure on the media independent of the authorities, so that they can be taken over by state-owned companies or businessmen favoring the authorities. As a whole, this decline in media freedom can be viewed as a strategy that antagonizes society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What challenges have we met while writing the history of communist countries before and after 1989? This article introduces a special section devoted to the historiography of the recent past in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. It shows that many of the methodological choices made after 1989 eschewed any critical examination and replicated or denied choices made before 1989 without reflecting on them. The section also reflects upon personal continuities. And it finally shows that history writing has been instrumentalized for political purposes after 1989 just as it had been before 1989. In other words, it acutely raises the question of continuities in historical practices despite the 1989 political rupture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Farmers in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe are the major beneficiaries of the European Union's (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), at least in monetary terms. Why, then, are they dissatisfied with the CAP? This study aims to understand farmers' subjectivities (i.e., judgments shaped by personal opinions and feelings) regarding CAP and compares these subjectivities to the actual impact of CAP in rural areas. It is based on empirical research in the Błaszki commune in central Poland, where the farmers' movement Agrounia originated. The study has found that in addition to its benefits, CAP created a number of new problems, such as socio-economic differentiation and related tensions in rural communities, misuse of the CAP's direct payments, disappearance of rural (peasant) lifestyle, and environmental degradation. The empirical material has also revealed the fragile position of Polish farmers in the domestic market, which affects their dignity and self-esteem. Agrounia seeks to address the latter issue, yet it faces the problems of farmer mobilization and negative representation in the media. This article contributes to the discussions about the applicability of CAP in the post-socialist context, the impact of farmers' subjectivities on their practices, and the farmers' mobilization and social movements in post-socialist countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory politics in contemporary Poland has often been described as a limitation to historians' freedom of research. Against this backdrop, this article explores how historians of the Polish People's Republic (PRL) have been contributing to memory politics in the context of the democratic transition. It argues that the dissidence of the 1980s has paved the way to the post-1989 historiographical renewal, by favoring the development of an anti-communist historiography that ultimately facilitated the advent of the historical policy (polityka historyczna) of the 2000s. After 1989, the Polish historiography of the PRL was extensively reshaped on the basis of the dissident historiography of the 1980s. The main protagonists of the 1990s were largely drawn from the ranks of dissent, and many of them saw their scholarship as an extension of their past anti-communist engagement. Additionally, political changes turned the legacy of the old regime into a central issue of post-communist politics. History was called upon as a policy tool at the service of the democratic transition, whether it involved criminalizing the communist regime or maintaining the collective memory of the dictatorship. This conception of history resulted in the creation of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) at the end of the 1990s, but also in the affirmation of a historical policy justified by the need to redress the wrongs of the memory politics conducted in communist Poland. Contemporary history in the post-1989 years was thus far from free of politicization, even if it took different forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how economic change after 1989 was perceived and rooted in society through cultural representations, specifically in the film production of Poland and Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic and Slovakia). The starting premise of this investigation is that popular commercial films, alongside the media and discourse of politicians and other key actors of the systemic transformation, also informed ideas about the free market circulating in the public sphere. Filmmakers, faced with the new realities brought about initially by the gradual liberalization of the economy in the late 1980s and later the systemic change of the economic transformation in both countries, immediately turned to capturing and fictionalizing the changes surrounding them. They presented audiences with role models of what it means to be a capitalist, but also tales of warning. This article investigates the "transformation cinema" of the 1990s, focusing on the figure of the entrepreneur and private enterprise. It examines how filmmakers searched for a visual language to critique or affirm the new social order, but also continued to work with inherited modes from the late socialist era. The article asserts that while the economic expectations conveyed through cinema focused largely on structuring the imagination of a new middle class in Poland, Czech(oslovak) cinema adopted a more sceptical outlook, suggesting that the promises of the free market were not available to "ordinary" working people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes discussions around the documentary film Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann, conducted in the uncensored press in communist Poland. In the literature on the subject, a popular thesis claims that the democratic opposition in Poland, like the authorities of the Polish People's Republic, subjected this film to explicit criticism. The authors' research into discussions about the Holocaust in the Polish independent press leads to the opposite conclusion. Ours analysis shows that authors publishing in the underground press had varied reactions to Lanzmann's film. Voices opposing the official campaign against the director and his film predominate (which did not mean a complete lack of criticism vis-à-vis some of the movie's features). We found only two opinions that can be considered clearly negative. The debate about Lanzmann's film is important because it shows the complexity of the democratic opposition's attitude of toward Polish-Jewish history and memory. In the opposition elite's view of history, two currents ran in parallel, often in statements authored by the same people. On the one hand, the trend was primarily affirmative, as a reaction to the communist propaganda that bypassed or completely distorted some aspects of Polish history. On the other hand, there was also a tendency to include more controversial or even clearly shameful aspects of the history of Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the years 1945–1953, the Kraków weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, approved by both Church and state, occupied a unique position. Its apolitical stance, inspired to a large extent by the Catholic philosophy of personalism, meant that within certain limits it enjoyed remarkable freedom. This article considers Tygodnik’s place in the early postwar Polish landscape, including its avowedly apolitical approach (dubbed “minimalism”) as it compared with that of other Catholic groups, how it dealt with increasing communist pressure, and what it managed to achieve before its closure. Among Tygodnik’s primary concerns were the defence of Polish society and culture against the war’s lingering psychological aftereffects, for example by encouraging discussions of what now would be called society’s “post-traumatic shock,” and reconciliation with the Germans. The newspaper also sought to defend Polish culture against communisation, in part by providing a forum for unconventional writers (who were at least nominally Catholic), resisting socialist realism and publishing information on nonsocialist-realist art and music, and addressing the changes being implemented by the communists in terms of secularisation. With mounting pressure, however, Tygodnik found it increasingly difficult to make acceptable compromises, until finally in 1953 its editorial board deemed it impossible to continue its coexistence with the communist regime. As a result, it was closed by authorities until a change in the political climate enabled Tygodnik to renew publication in 1956. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the role played by the 1940 Katyń massacre in structuring foreign relations between post-communist Poland and Russia. In so doing, it offers a theoretical model through which to understand the combative politics over history that have burgeoned in Eastern and Central Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Tracing how political discourse over the massacre has evolved from the late 1980s to the present, it examines the impact of exogenous influences and changing geopolitical realities on how this event is recalled within these two states, which exhibit markedly different relationships to their shared past. Questions of regime type, relative standing within the region, and how—as well as by whom—interstate discourse over contentious historical events is initiated are all central to the model of dispute origination developed herein, as is the presence of various institutional factors, chief among them membership in the supranational European Union (EU). A shadow study of Polish–Ukrainian relations concerning history, focusing on the mass killing of ethnic Poles that took place in Volhynia and eastern Galicia in the period 1943–1945, is also undertaken in order to illuminate the significant differences in how the past has been politically activated in relations between the respective post-Soviet dyads of Poland–Russia and Poland–Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses political state capture in the context of party patronage. Evidence of this is delivered from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the rotations of members of their management and supervisory boards. In this case, it is deemed that an interest group, which consists of politicians and representatives in the government administration, decides about the appointment and dismissal of board members through the corporate governance of SOEs and ownership policy of the state. We analyzed the scale and intensity of rotations in Poland of about twelve thousand joint-stock companies in the years 2001–2017 according to their ownership structure. We show that changes of managers and supervisory board members in state-owned enterprises are higher than in private companies and are related to political elections. We estimated that on average three months after a new government is formed, a peak of changes in the composition of boards is observed, though they are earlier in the case of a supervisory board. We conclude that this can be regarded as an example of state capture by politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how Poland's ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), is attempting to apply its general strategy of "elite replacement" in a modified way to civil society. Since independent civil society organizations are not subject to arbitrary state control of appointments (unlike public institutions), this strategy has required a more complex dual approach of pressure and promotion. Organizations perceived as hostile to the party and its values have been subject to the withdrawal of state support and smear campaigns. By contrast, organizations that are politically or ideologically linked to the party have found support in the form of new public funds and other institutional assistance. This article examines the practical functioning and consequences of these processes through two main examples: (1) a state-sponsored campaign against one of Poland's largest independent charity organizations, the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity and (2) the funding of multiple right-wing NGOs friendly to PiS by the newly established National Freedom Institute. The article shows how PiS's dual strategy in civil society reinforces its political narratives through support of the broader right-wing cultural narratives that underpin them. At the same time, it demonstrates how funding of friendly organizations directly strengthens party structures by fostering the development of new political and administrative cadres. By analysing PiS's specific methods of pressure and promotion in the sphere of civil society, the article shows the intertwining of political and cultural narratives and goals within a right-wing populist framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article belongs to the special cluster "Here to Stay: The Politics of History in Eastern Europe", guest-edited by Félix Krawatzek & George Soroka. The rise of historical memory, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. At its initial stage, the rise of memory contributed to the decay of self-congratulatory national narratives and to the formation of a "cosmopolitan" memory centered on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity and informed by the notion of state repentance for the wrongdoings of the past. Laws criminalizing the denial of these crimes, which were adopted in "old" continental democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, were a characteristic expression of this democratic culture of memory. However, with the rise of national populism and the formation of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the politics of memory has taken a significantly different turn. National populists are remarkably persistent in whitewashing their countries' history and using it to promote nationalist mobilization. This process has manifested itself in the formation of new types of memory laws, which shift the blame for historical injustices to other countries (the 1998 Polish, the 2000 Czech, the 2010 Lithuanian, the June 2010 Hungarian, and the 2014 Latvian statutes) and, in some cases, openly protect the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (the 2005 Turkish, the 2014 Russian, the 2015 Ukrainian, the 2006 and the 2018 Polish enactments). The article examines Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian legislation regarding the past that demonstrates the current linkage between populism and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the wave of strikes that flooded Poland in 1980 and their effect on the birth of a social movement. It retraces the process of emerging protests and their spread throughout factories and regions. It also discusses the role of the Interfactory Strike Committees and shows the mechanisms of circulation of newsletters and leaflets published by strikers. The article demonstrates how the spread of information influenced the rate and scale of mobilization. The author focuses on the role of social networks and the mechanisms that enabled diffusion of the elements of this social movement. The spread of the protests to other cities relied largely on direct contact between individual factories but was also facilitated by the independent press and audio recordings. The analysis also addresses the role of "brokers," that is, people who disseminated information about the strike and increased the range of the protests. These "political tourists" observed the protests while on vacation or on business at the seaside and, on returning home, reported what they had seen, often bringing back strike-related information leaflets. The other group comprised "political emissaries" or people who intentionally established contact between individual protest centres. The article thus retraces the emergence of Solidarity starting from spontaneous strikes to the formation of a nationwide organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article belongs to the special cluster, "Think Tanks in Central and Eastern Europe", guest-edited by Katarzyna Jezierska and Serena Giusti. This article explores the image and reputation of think tanks in their reciprocal relationship with their environment. The aim is to unravel the logic of think tanks' institutional identity formation in the largely understudied context of Poland. How do Polish think tanks present themselves and how are they (re)presented by others? To answer these questions, the Goffmanian microsociological framework and positioning theory are adjusted to a study of institutions. The analysis of original interview and media data reveals that Polish think tanks project an image of and are perceived by the media as being weak. I argue that this image and reputation of weakness should primarily be explained by think tanks' and the media's perceptions of the political field, which confine the possible identity and positioning of think tanks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the role of trust in the underground structures of the Polish opposition in the 1980s. The empirical material on which the analysis is based comprises historical sources concerning the history of one of the opposition groups in Warsaw, formed around an underground trade union structure (Inter-Enterprise Coordinating Committee), underground periodical ("Wola") and a few other oppositional initiatives. The author looks for answers to the following questions: What types of trust can we find in the underground? What did it mean that one conspirator trusted another? and What was trust based on? First, the author characterizes the Solidarity movement after the imposition of martial law and shows why during this time the problem of trust was so important. Then he explains why this topic is interesting and useful not only for a historian of Solidarity but also for other researchers. He places his research in the context of historians' works about trust, and especially about the problem of trust in communist countries. The author proposes two classifications of trust in the underground. He distinguishes trust regarding the following traits of colleagues: reliability, discretion, and integrity. The second classification concerns the basis for trust. The first type ("old") is trust based on prior contact. The second type ("new") is trust built during underground activity. In the conclusion, the author considers the role of trust in underground activity. The author puts forward the thesis that in opposition activities, trust was much more important than shared political views, to which historians of the Polish opposition generally attach great importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how dissidents in the latter half of the 1970s "played the law" in the Polish People's Republic. Laws established by an undemocratic government, and thus theoretically lacking democratic legitimacy, were used by the opposition to delegitimize the government. The author describes the goals of the opposition and the lines of argument it employed, and how the Communist party—the other player in this peculiar game—made reciprocal efforts to exploit the law in order to weaken the opposition. The article discusses the specific international and Polish legal documents referenced by both sides of this game—the opposition and the government. The law was an important resource for both sides. This analysis nuances and demythologizes popular claims about the "Helsinki effect" by illustrating the role and legal context of the Helsinki Accords against the backdrop of local laws and the strategies undertaken by both actors. Furthermore, it describes the important institutional setting that influenced the types of actions undertaken by the protest movement in communist Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information about the importance of the papers written by the American ambassador to the Soviet Union William Averell Harriman regarding the U.S. and Soviet Union partnership and on the relation to the Polish question. According to the author, Harriman has played a key role since his attempts to resolve the Polish problem has involved his search for a Polish Beneš. Furthermore, Harriman has argued that his concern for an early settlement of the Polish issue is predicated upon a certain suspicion of Soviet designs on its allies.

This article discusses the history of the so-called book program—a joint effort by the US government, the East European diaspora, and readers of prohibited books behind the Iron Curtain. Between 1956 and 1989, the program purchased some ten million copies of publications and delivered them to people in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe in order to undermine communist rule. The article gives nuanced explanations of the motivations and practices of book-takers, placing Cold War books in the context of consumer goods trades. Using the historical materials of the Polonia Book Fund, a US-sponsored publishing project for Poland, this article contributes new insights on the transatlantic perspective of the cultural Cold War. This article focuses on the program's early stages, and describes various elements of the transnational smuggling network. The program's state–private partnership was a workable solution that helped to foster a diversity of opinions in post-Stalinist Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]