The Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Poland: Comparative Analysis of Social Structure and Party Strategy

Under the puzzling circumstances of a strong domestic economy and the relatively stable mainstream policymaking of the incumbents, Law and Justice (PiS), a right-wing populist party, momentously won the 2015 presidential and parliamentary elections in Poland. Using a comparative approach, the thesis examines the structural forces and policy dimensions/goals, which have provided the necessary conditions for the populist right-wing program to appeal to a wide variety of demographic groups, resulting in an electoral victory and to some degree in the redrawing of political and social boundaries. The conducted field study served as a hypothesis-generating exercise to gauge the voter sentiment informally in Poland. Based on the empirical data from a sample comprised of Poland’s seven post-communist democratic counterparts, statistical models depictive of combinations of structural exogenous conditions, as well as policy packages of political parties, were recorded in an effort to capture cross-national similarities and differences, and to shed light on key success factors that systematically contribute to the rise of right-wing populism in modern Eastern Europe. The empirical analysis was supplemented with widely cited scholarship on the topic of populism, populist adaptation, and populist politics.