Regional Elections in Poland: Beyond the Second-Order Elections Thesis

Since 1989, Poland has retained a centralized structure of political competition, with regional, autonomist movements being present in one region only (The Movement for the Autonomy of the Slask Region). Despite this fact, the degree of public interest in local elections has increased, primarily due to the introduction of direct elections for mayors at all local levels (cities, towns and communities) in 2002. However, academic attention for regional elections is very low, both on conceptual and empirical levels. In this paper,we adopt a multilevel perspective and we take a fresh look at the nature of regional elections in Poland. Moreover, Polish regional elections are compared with regional elections in other Central and Eastern European countries. Conceptually, our analysis shows a limited explanatory value of the second-order election thesis. Empirically, we analyse the level of congruence of the vote between the regional and national elections and look at sources of territorial variation in the vote. The results confirm a growing nationalization of regional elections in Poland. In comparison to regional elections in other Central and Eastern European countries, two main distinctive features of Polish regional elections stand out. First, there is mixed evidence for a second-order election interpreation of Polish regional elections. Second, ethnic differences hardly leave an imprint on regional election results in Poland.