Radoslaw Markowski and
Joshua A. Tucker, "Euroscepticism and the Emergence of
Political Parties in Poland," Party Politics, 16
(July, 2010), 523-548. [Available at ]
First paragraph:
On 7-8 June 2003, over 17 million Polish citizens turned out
to vote in the country's historic referendum on whether or
not to join the European Union (EU) the following year. Of
the 58.85 percent of eligible Poles who participated in the
referendum, 77.45 percent, or approximately 13.5 million
citizens, voted for membership. One of the most interesting
features of the referendum was the strong link between
voting behaviour in the referendum and voting behaviour in
the 2001 Polish parliamentary election. Simply put, voters
who had supported one of the two Eurosceptic parties in the
2001 parliamentary election - which together captured almost
one-fifth of the national vote - were much more likely to
vote against EU membership in the 2003 referendum than
voters who had supported pro-EU parties in 2001. Indeed, the
effect of this one variable - vote choice in the 2001
parliamentary election - dwarfed the effect of all standard
socio-demographic indicators in predicting the likelihood of
voting for or against EU membership (Gazeta Wyborcza, 2003;
Markowski and Tucker, 2005). For those who study public
opinion towards EU membership in Western Europe, such
findings might not be particularly surprising, as there is a
history of citizens taking cues on their position towards EU
membership from their preferred party (Anderson, 1998;
Taggart, 1998). In post-communist countries, however,
parties have long been presumed to be weak and less
influential on the attitudes of their supporters, especially
in Poland (Lewis, 2000; Markowski, 2002). Moreover, one of
the Eurosceptic parties, the League of Polish Families
(LPR), was created just months before the 2001 parliamentary
elections, while the other, Self-Defence of the Republic of
Poland (SRP), had received on average no more than 1 percent
of the vote in previous national elections.
Figures and
Tables:
Table 1. Attitudes towards EU membership by
non-voters, voters for Eurosceptic parties, and voters
for other parties, 2001
Table 2. Eurosceptic positions on EU-related issues
by vote choice
Table 3. Average left-right self-placement of
Eurosceptics by 2001 vote choice
Figure 1. Polish attitudes toward the European Union:
1997-2005
Table 4. Euroscepticism by election year and vote
choice
Table 5. Party identification intensity and level of
Euroscepticism by groups of voters
Table 6. Determinant of attitudes towards the EU:
regression coefficients
Appendix I. Supplementary Tables
Last Paragraph:
(first paragraph of conclusion) We began this article with a
puzzle: why was there such a close link among voters who
supported either the LPR or SRP in the 2001 parliamentary
election and the subsequent decision to vote against Polish
entry into the EU in the 2003 referendum on EU membership?
We have effectively falsified the simplest answer to this
question: it does not appear to be the case that the LPR and
SRP simply attracted voters in 2001 that had no opinion on
EU membership and then provided a cue regarding a
second-order concern when necessary two years later. On the
contrary, our analyses provide an example of how new parties
can emerge when a large proportion of the electorate is
unrepresented on an important policy dimension. We have also
moved a bit beyond the Downsian model to examine the
question of what happens next. Here, we see that the
relationship between anti-EU sentiment and support for these
parties continued through the 2005 election, albeit in a
stronger form for the LPR than SRP.
