Research Project

In recent years, the world has witnessed a retreat from democracy as right-wing populist leaders and parties who attack the norms of liberalism from within have won strong electoral support in several countries. Democratic backsliding is the process by which duly elected government officials gradually erode democratic institutions, rules, and norms. The prevalence of democratic backsliding has led to a growing body of literature dedicated to analyzing its causal mechanisms, but little is known about what comes next. How does a nation recover from populism? The goal of this research paper is to investigate the October 2023 Polish election in which the pro-democracy Civic Coalition emerged victorious, dethroning the right-wing populist “Prawo i Sprawiedliwość” (PiS) Party, which enacted many anti-democratic reforms over the past eight years. This paper seeks to contribute to the theory of institutional change by reconstructing key post-election political conflicts over the judiciary that exemplify the struggle between Prime Minister Donald Tusk and PiS Leader Jarosław Kaczyński. Further, this paper analyzes the change of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal and Supreme Court through the lens of two political actors denying each other legitimacy leading to an institutional gridlock. Lastly, I rely on abductive reasoning to develop a new theory of institutional change in a situation of acute polarization whereby winners and losers of elections challenge the legitimacy of each other’s efforts to redefine the institutional architecture of the state.