On Sunday, “Bronis?aw Komorowski”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronis%C5%82aw_Komorowski, the “acting president”:http://www.bronislawkomorowski.pl/ of Poland, was “elected to a full five year term”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/05/AR2010070502943.html. He defeaeted “Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski”:http://jaroslawkaczynski.info/ by a margin of “53.01% to 46.99%”:http://prezydent2010.pkw.gov.pl/PZT/PL/WYN/W/index.htm. Kaczy?ski was running to succeed his twin brother “Lech Kaczy?ski”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech_Kaczy%C5%84ski, who was tragically killed in a “plane crash last spring”:http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/transitions. Excellent coverage of the election can be found on the “Gazeta Wyborcza web site”:http://wyborcza.pl/Polityka/0,103834.html, and the results are already available on the home page of the Polish national election commission in “Polish”:http://prezydent2010.pkw.gov.pl/PZT/PL/WYN/W/index.htm and “English”:http://prezydent2010.pkw.gov.pl/PZT/EN/WYN/W/index.htm.
The actual result of the election is largely in keeping with what one would have expected before the plane crash. As I “previously posted on the Monkey Cage”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/04/observing_a_sympathy_vote_jaro.html, Komorowski’s popularity ratings had long out stripped those of both Lech and Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski, and once he received the nomination of the ruling “Civic Platform party”:http://www.platforma.org/, he was widely expected to win the presidential elections, which were originally due to be held this fall.
While scholars of Polish politics will undoubtedly be interested in the dynamics that allowed a candidate of the center-right Civic Platform to become the most popular candidate in the country – especially after the failure of Civic Platform to win the 2005 presidential elections – for political scientists who do not focus specifically on Polish politics this election will likely attract attention in attempts to measure the “sympathy effect”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/04/observing_a_sympathy_vote_jaro.html. Put another way, the big question coming out of this election is not why Komorowski won the election, but rather why he only won by 6% of the vote. Three explanations seem likely:
# *The sympathy effect*: here the argument would be that Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski was able to do much better than expected because of sympathy on the part of the electorate for the death of his brother. It may be that all policitians are rehabilitated in death (although see “here”:http://www-personal.arts.usyd.edu.au/sterobrt/hsty3080/StudentWebSites/Nixon%20Obits/source9), and it was precisely the death of Lech that lead to Jaros?aw’s much better than expected performance.
# *The campaign effect*: here the argument would be that campaigning against a politician – albeit an unpopular one – who had just lost his twin brother in a national tragedy would be a difficult task for even the most seasoned and polished of policians, of which Komorowski was not. (Having not been in Poland for the campaign, I am relying on second hand accounts of the “deficiencies in Komorowski’s campaign”:http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1568549.php/Reports-Slim-win-in-Polish-vote-could-pressure-Komorowski-s-party; I welcome comments from anyone who has been in Poland on this point.)
# *The polarization effect*: here the argument would be that ultimately, Polish politics remains fairly polarized between a kind of traditionalist Catholic electorate and a more pro-European cosmopolitan electorate, and that ultimately any election that got to the second round with one candidate representing each of these forces was going to be somewhat close, just as the 2005 election was close. In this view, a 6% difference between the two candidates wouldn’t be all that surprising even if the plane crash had never happened.
I think trying to sort out the empirical evidence needed to support and falsify these three arguments could make for a very interesting paper.
From the point of view of policy makers, the big take-away point from this election is that Civic Platform, the most pro-reform, pro-market of Poland’s political forces these days, now controls both the government and the presidency. While Poland’s president is nowhere near as strong as presidents in classical “presidential systems”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_system such as those found in the US or most of South America, the president still has the ability to veto legislation. Thus with the presidency now in the hands of Civic Platform as well, the current Polish government should have no impediments to implementing its preferred legislation, a marked change since it came to power in 2007 and had to co-exist with the Lech Kaczynski presidency.
This actually leads to a second interesting implication of the election for political scientists. In the study of economic voting, we often distinguish between _high responsibility_ governments and _low responsibility_ governments in terms of responsibilty for the state of the economy. With an opposition president with veto power, up until now the Civic Platform government could legitimately define itself as a low responsbiility government: it could not necessarily implement the legislation it wanted to implement and therefore would have an excuse come next year’s parliamentary elections for the current state of the economy. With control of the presidency, the government now moves much closer to a high responsibility status (although it still has a coalition partner), which may make deflecting blame for any poor economic conditions that much harder. So something to keep an eye on.