Lokomotywy” czy „odkurzacze”? – O wynikach liderów list wyborczych. Polemika z Wojciechem Peszyńskim
"LOCOMOTIVES" OR “VACUUM CLEANERS”? - ABOUT THE RESULTS OF THE LEADERS ON THE ELECTORAL LISTS. THE POLEMIC WITH WOJCIECH PESZYŃSKI

Summary/Abstract: The author presents the analysis of the role of the leaders of the electoral lists in the Polish parliamentary elections. He presents the opinion, that the candidates who get the highest numbers of votes on the list, rather don’t contribute to the better result of all the list, but first of all they take votes from the other candidates from the same list – so they act not as “electoral locomotives”, but as “vacuum cleaners”. At first voters choose the party they vote for, and only later they choose the person from this list who gets their vote. If there is a popular political leader on the list, it is really difficult for the rest of the candidates to convict voters that they are worth voting for them, so they get the seats with the relatively low numbers of votes. The opinions presented in the article are supported by the results of the elections held in Poland in the last years. This text is the polemic with Wojciech Peszyński, who – on the columns of Studia Wyborcze – presented his thesis of the great role of the party leaders and wrote about the “passenger without tickets”, who are the deputies, who were on the electoral list with the party leader and who were elected to the parliament despite of getting the small number of votes.

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