The “revival of communism” or the effect of institutions?: The 1993 Polish parliamentary elections

Abstract

In several Eastern European countries the breakdown of communism in 1989 was followed by a surprising return to power of post-communist parties. Yet, some electoral victories of post-communists look puzzling when contrasted with a small size of a shift in voters’ preferences that has led to them. Such is the case of the 1993 Polish parliamentary elections. Using partition-function form games and results of simulated elections, we estimate the impact of three factors that were blamed, in addition to the “shift to the left” in voters’ preferences, for the 1993 victory of the post-communists in Poland. We show that the shift to the left was insufficient to assure post-communists an electoral victory, and that this victory would not have happened under the old electoral law or under a unified coalition of the Right. Our results show the high sensitivity of emerging democracies to the details of their institutional backbones.

The authors are grateful to the companies Case and SMG-KRC Poland for sponsoring a survey used in this study, to the polling agency CBOS for granting access to their survey data, to Jarek Gryz for implementing the simulation program SEATS, and to Jerzy Bartkowski, Irena Jackiewicz, Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, Krzysztof Kruszewski, Marcin Kujawski, Marcia Penconek, Antoni Sulek, and Jim Vreeland for comments and help with data collection. Swistak thanks the Office of International Affairs and the University of Maryland for a financial support.