Dr Kateryna Zabarina will present the results of a study conducted with Dr Anna Lewczuk-Czerwińska
Dr Kateryna Zabarina will present the results of a study conducted together with Dr Anna Lewczuk-Czerwińska. The seminar is part of the Spatial Warsaw Seminars series.
The lecture „The impact of war in Ukraine on the spread of populistic and anti-EU political parties’ attitudes in Poland” will take place on 24 November at 17:00 in room B111 at the Faculty of Economic Sciences. Those interested in attending online are kindly asked to contact Dr Zabarina at: o{Vwe!F|]5qS`kQ'7~2Y.?9]#[[v4ZGr+k?PiBFtGzDdqO7+$.
The abstract of the presentation is provided below.
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According to the report published by the Public Opinion Research Center (CBOS) 20 years after Poland became a member of the European Union (EU), the Poles attitude towards EU membership is the lowest in a decade, with 77% of respondents in favour of Poland’s presence in this organisation and 17% against (CBOS 2024). The question that arises in this context is what is the spatial distribution of voters’ discontent with EU, and in particular whether the proximity to war fought just beyond the Polish border impacts voter’s support for anti-EU parties. In our paper we aim to explore the relationship between the spread of Polish voters’ tolerance for parties’ anti-EUposition and proximity to the Ukrainian border. Our contribution with this paper is to explain the effect of the outburst of war in Ukraine in 2022 on the spread of the abovementioned attitude.
A variety of studies from the fields of public choice or political science focused on the relationship between the parties’ populist attitudes and their declared support for Ukraine. To assess the correlation of the war in Ukraine with the spread of voters’ tolerance for anti-EU attitudes of political parties in Poland, we propose a spatial empirical model forecasted on a municipality-level data in Poland. Based on the municipality-level lower chamber election results and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey data (Bakker et al. 2020), we propose an index capturing the change in the intensity of voters’ tolerance for parties’ anti-EU position between the elections of 2019 and 2023. What is more, we proxy the impact of war in Ukraine on the voters’ perception of anti-EU sentiments by accounting for the variety of distance measures of a given municipality from the Polish-Ukrainian border.
To our best knowledge it is the first study focused on explaining the micro-scale anti-EU voting patterns in Poland taking into account the impact of proximity to conflict in Ukraine and using the advanced spatial econometric models.