A key empirical finding emerging from studies of Polish public opinion conducted over the past year is that the dismantling of both the informal norms and formal institutions of liberal democracy is backed by a social coalition in which the most prominent groups are older individuals from traditionalist social settings (close-knit, religious, rural), and younger persons from different backgrounds who believe that their prospects of economic mobility have stalled. Conversely, defenders of the liberal-democratic model are concentrated among the middle-age groups, principally among the urban middle classes.
This suggests that the key difference as regards support for liberal democracy is not the experience of having reached adulthood under conditions of freedom vs. unfreedom. Rather, the difference seems to be about having lived through the transition of the 1990s as an adult and having experienced that era as a time of upward social mobility, vs. having been bypassed by these changes or arriving on the scene too late to take advantage of them.
These findings are pertinent to our understanding of communist legacies for democratic (de)consolidation: what seems to matter most for support for liberal vs. illiberal politics is not the legacies of communism per se, but rather the legacy of opportunities opened up—and taken advantage of (or not, as the case may be)—by its breakdown.
We posit that this divide—between those who experienced upward mobility in the 1990s and those who didn’t (or were too young)—is not only about shifts in objective socio-economic position, but also about the subjective embrace of “winner” vs. “loser” identity articulated by contrasting ideological narratives: individual empowerment and emancipation on the liberal-democratic side, vs. “linked fate” of suffering shared injustices on the nationalist-populist side. We test these propositions using a rich body of survey data spanning over two decades.
