Społeczne podstawy systemu partyjnego – zarys tematyki w perspektywie Polski
The social foundations of the party system: the outline and the case of Poland

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents the ongoing discussion about Polish party system formation and its foundations among society. It also reviews the the literature that has studied the origins of cleavage based party systems, originally presented by Lipset and Rokkan, as well as theoretical and empirical assessments. For a long period of time Polish party system was depicted as very unstable, lacking any sign of institutionalization and where voters had showed no strong ties to political parties. This paper presents an argument that since 2004 this situation has started to change. In the second part of the review it is suggested that the current state of the Polish party system gives us strong indications that the new cleavage may have come into being, namely, between liberal and solidarity values, which convincingly correlates with electorates of two biggest parties: Law and Justice (PiS) and Civic Platform (PO).

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