The Impact of Electoral Ruleson the Quality of Local Democracy in Poland

The main goal of the project is to test the impact of newly implemented electoral rules pertaining to local elections in Poland. In 2011, Polish legislators decided that some of the municipalities would be treated as counties (powiat), while others would not have that status. As a consequence, city councils of the municipalities in the first category have become single-mandate constituencies, while the municipalities in the second category are elected in multi-member constituencies. The situation presents an absolutely unique opportunity to assess the effects of institutional design (electoral rules) in a quasi-experimental fashion. We will take this rare opportunity to evaluate this impact rigorously.

Our main concern thus is to investigate the impact of these, de facto randomly designed changes in electoral rules, on a set of phenomena considered to be crucial for evaluation of the quality of contemporary democracies and the effectiveness of political governance. We will evaluate the following aspects of the system:

1. the composition of the elected city councils and the way the operate
2. voters turnout
3. the level of political efficacy
4. the level of citizen engagement in the public domain.

The experimental design of the study provided an opportunity to collect data suitable for testing our hypotheses about the “mechanical” and “psychological” impact of the change in electoral law on several aspects, including the political system, voters behavior, and behavior of politicians at the local level. Our empirical analysis revealed a system, whose citizens are unable to notice the fundamental change in the electoral law. This is crucial, because the right to vote and changes in the electoral system make sense only if the citizens are able to “take advantage” of their diverse characteristics. When asked what kind of an electoral system is in force in their municipality, the majority of participants answered that they did not know or provided a wrong answer. As the result, the analysis of the collected data was insufficient to fully measure the impact of the new electoral law on voters’ behavior.

Belief in one's political agency

Nevertheless, the study enabled us to propose a number of general assumptions pertaining to another important aspect of the project, i.e. a belief in one’s political agency. Firstly, the belief in one’s agency is determined mainly by factors, which are universally recognized by contemporary political science, including the majority rule, as such. Secondly, we noted a strong correlation between voters turnout and the said belief in one’s political agency. Thirdly, the belief is strongly related to the strength of social roots in the local community and their public engagement. Fourthly, the level of belief in one’s political agency differentiates visions of political representation (the role of delegates vs. fiduciaries). The most important result confirms our theoretical assumption that in the municipalities with proportional representation, the support for the vision of the representative-fiduciary increases with the increase of the belief in one’s own political agency. Finally, an expectation that representatives should be “socially” similar (in terms of socio-demographic characters) to voters is higher in single-mandate constituencies and grows with the increase of the belief in one’s own political agency.

Summary of results

The obtained results can be grouped into expected and unexpected ones and those that from the point of view of properly functioning democracy, could be characterized as positive or negative. The ones that describe the correlation between voters turnout and their belief in political agency, and those that confirm a strong relationship between political competencies as well as, more broadly, the level of education with an appropriate understanding of the role of representation and the belief in one’s political agency, can be classified as expected and positive. On the other hand, a very low level of awareness of the current electoral law and its changes among Poles, can be classified as somewhat expected but strongly negative.

The study did not provide a clear-cut answer on the impact of the electoral system on the visions of representation or the belief in one’s political agency. It seems, however, that it might be due to insufficient duration of to the study. After all, citizens require time and daily experiences related to the way government institutions function to become familiar with new procedures. Moreover, newly established political institutions should be sufficiently long-lasting for people to learn about them and provide citizens with an opportunity to accept or reject them.