Democracy in Poland is a book that every scholar writing on the development of democracy in Poland should have and use. It provides one of the, if not the, most exhaustive collections of empirical data from Polish sources for what now seems to be the “golden” period of post-communist democracy in Poland, 1989 to 2011. In doing this, it provides the election results for national elections in terms not only of the levels of participation but also the representation of various socio-economic groups and women in individual elections, parties, and parliaments. In addition, there is data on citizens' engagement in civil society and legislative initiatives as well as the shifts in politicians' affiliations with individual parties and coalitions. Finally, unlike many of the studies of Poland's post-communist democratization, this volume also details the triggers for and changes in the laws regulating the various branches of government and their interactions, as well as empirical data on how these branches of government interacted with each other and what shifts were made in the process. All of this empirical data is critical not only for Gwiazda's argument in this study of the positive development of Polish democracy but also as an empirical resource for new research on democratic development elsewhere in central and eastern Europe and, sadly, for a rethinking of Polish politics since the victory of the Law and Justice Party (Prawo I Sprawiedliwosc) in 2015 and the rapid decline of Poland's democracy.
The book is far more than a compendium of facts and statistics. It is a model of focused scholarship detailing how democracy developed and responded to challenges between the Roundtable Accords and first semi-free election in 1989 and the 2011 parliamentary election. Gwiazda used a different and more empirical measure of democracy that does not simply focus on the standard qualities of free and fair elections, civil rights, and the rule of law. Instead, she focused on whether and how Polish democracy achieved what she posits as the standard democratic goals of being representative, participatory, competitive, and accountable.
This approach provides a more robust analysis of the development and quality of Polish democracy than have historical approaches or those focused simply on the existence of elections, rights, and the rule of law. In the process, she presents new data on elements like party switching by deputies and the significant and innovative, if limited, citizens' initiatives in legislation that are seldom considered in analyses of the Polish case.
Her study of Polish democratic development, though, ended in 2011 when Polish democracy, viewed from the perspective of 2017, was in its “golden moment.” Like virtually every other study of the first quarter century of democracy in Poland done to date, it does not really prepare us to explain the sharp turn away from democracy (and citizens' support for this retreat) since the 2015 victory of the Law and Justice Party (Prawo I Sprawiedliwosc) in both the presidential and parliamentary elections. In part, its power has come from the electoral law, designed to prevent tiny parties from splintering the parliament, as they did after Poland's first fully free election in 1991, by requiring a party or coalition to get a minimum percentage of the vote in order to get seats in parliament. This magnified Law and Justice's power in the Sejm, as it magnified the left's power in 1993.
This time, however, what looked like a stable party system, albeit with some shifting from one party to another by deputies, with well-established rules that insured no single institution or party could control everything, failed dramatically to protect the Constitutional Court's rights and even the democratic procedures in the Polish parliament. This does not make the empirical data and analysis in this volume any less valuable both as a resource for scholars and as a new model for evaluating democratic development. What it does demand is that we look at this data and the four goals of democracy in light of the apparent vulnerability of Polish democracy and that of others to see what we all missed or how what looked like achievements in democratic development and consolidation could so easily be manipulated and even cast aside.
