Partisan bias or a climate of indifference?An investigation of actually-existing democratic values and their consequences in Poland

The project will undertake a three-wave panel survey of a representative sample of the Polish population between the summer of 2022 and the winter of 2023. These surveys will have three key characteristics.

1. They will contain an innovative new set of questions designed to measure democratic values in ways that overcome the “social desirability bias” (the tendency to want to be associated with something society considers positive when answering survey questions) that many researchers believe artificially inflates the level of approval for liberal democracy.
2. The surveys will use “conjoint experiments” (a survey technique for identifying causal explanations for the choices respondents make), to test the extent to which Poles act in accordance with liberal-democratic principles when making political choices.
3. The panel nature of the research design will measure the views and attitudes of voters over an 18-month period, allowing us to establish whether pro-democratic attitudes and behaviors remain stable or are prone to fluctuate.

We expect to find that levels of “actually-existing” democratic values are lower than those typically declared in standard survey questions, but that they remain stable over time. However, in line with similar research conducted primarily in the United States, we expect to find that political polarization interferes with:

• the extent to which Polish citizens view post-2015 changes as legitimate or illegitimate from the perspective of democratic values
• their capacity to ‘punish’ political elites for taking illiberal and undemocratic actions.