Five Media Myths about Democracy in Poland: Myth Number One - Democracy Is Static
Central Europe Digest
Posted: 20 Oct 2006
In this short series, I will argue that current political commentary in Poland is infected by five myths about democracy. These myths take their root from a fundamental misunderstanding of democratic theory, and from uncritical importation of fashionable liberal interest group theories. Their advocates have successfully peddled such concepts as multilevel governance or civic dialogue to undemocratic international organizations, whose bureaucracies desperately seek some measure of popular legitimacy. Now their ideas infect national democratic systems. Proponents of interest group liberalism disparage majoritarian democracy, in which the parliament and political parties are the main carriers of vox populi. They deny the parliamentary process its deliberative function, which should lead to the creation of governing majorities with representatives bound by their conscience and not party discipline.
Today, I am taking up the first myth that results from these undemocratic theories: that democracy is a static exercise of power by stable and disciplined coalitions of parties understood as cohesive interest groups. In truth, legislative politics in established democracies is very often a fluctuating chain of logrolls and temporary coalitions, even in systems with traditionally high party discipline. This healthy process is augmented by a doctrine of the free mandate, which gives a member of parliament (MP) full freedom to choose his or her party affiliation once elected. Recent events in Poland show that some media elites have problems understanding the dynamic aspects of legislative politics that are and should be divorced from the electoral scene in case of a coalition crisis. In the next four articles, I will tackle the other four, equally important, falsehoods besieging Polish political commentators - namely, that democracy is defined by transparency, consensus, public diplomacy, and apolitical administration.
My goal is to use current political events in Poland to familiarize the reader with some empirical research on democracy as well as to shed light on the often-unnoticed pathologies of reporting on democracy in Poland, sometimes unscrupulously used by the opposition to the detriment of the public understanding of the democratic process.
It has been almost a year since the right took power in Poland. In the meantime, Poland has seen a change of prime ministers and the break-up and sudden reactivation of the ruling coalition. Substantively, the coalition can claim no small legislative successes. It has started to deliver in the area of breaking up the so-called "iron triangles" of secret service agents, businessmen and politicians that are connected by what Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński calls "the grey network." The recently-established Anti-Corruption Bureau has been set up to track and prosecute these informal, criminal networks. The government has also set about dismantling the post-communist Military Information Services (the secret service arm of the Polish military) and has taken steps to reform legal cartels and the judiciary. It is obvious that the Law and Justice Party (PiS) takes its name seriously. While the opposition can rightly claim that the government has so far taken a passive stance towards the economy, the currently-deliberated budget (authored by Zyta Gilowska - a principled liberal) is not an exercise in fiscal foolhardiness. PiS - while claiming to be an unapologetically "social" party - has taken pains not to break the 30 billion-złoty ($10 billion) deficit limit. Yet what has gained most attention in recent weeks are "the Beger tapes" and "the Lesiak files," which have become the rallying cries of the opposition and the government respectively. These two incidents, portrayed as scandals in the media, and the political discussion around them reveal dangerous myths that effect considerable harm to the public perceptions about the political process in Poland. Today, the discussion will focus on "the tapes of truth" as they are often called, leaving the revelations of Colonel Lesiak's wardrobe for later.
Case 1: The Debate over "the Beger Tapes"
The hidden camera footage from a few weeks back shows an important PiS official negotiating a a defection of MP Renata Beger from PiS' coalition partner, the Self-Defense Party. Defected Self-Defense MPs were to form a new club, friendly to the government. Just a few days earlier the prime minister fired a Self-Defense leader, Andrzej Lepper, from the post of deputy prime minister and the minister of agriculture over a budget row. The problem highlighted in the conversation was the way in which the Self-Defense MPs have been tied to their party, which made their defection difficult. They had to sign an IOU to the party leader, Mr. Lepper, promising to pay the party a hefty sum of money in case of leaving the party ranks. The points of contention revolved around PiS' attempt to make Beger defect from her party by offering her a position in the government, some legal help, and - most importantly - a cheap solution to the IOU problem. The Civic Platform - the main (albeit politically similar) opposition party to the ruling PiS - believes that the biggest sin of PiS was to speculate on how to bail the Self-Defense defectors out of the putative monetary obligation to their party. The solution talked about in the tapes was for PiS to create an IOU fund or to pass a legislative measure freeing Self-Defense Party members from the debt. That, in the opinion of the Civic Platform leaders, amounted to political corruption.
Parties Are Not Interest Groups: Party Switching and the Doctrine of the Free Mandate
The criticism heaped upon PiS by the media and the opposition is based on two false claims about democracy that quarrel with standards and practices of many established democracies. The first one concerns the purportedly undemocratic process whereby the ruling party tries to get members of another party to switch into the majority coalition. It is supposed to be unethical and not in line with the standards of civilized politics - in the West, of course. However, the simple fact is that coalitions do break up occasionally, especially around the time of budget debates. When that happens, it is not unheard of for MPs to defect from their parties, create new party groups or join others. In fact, there is a whole political science literature on party switching, which shows us that - for example - in Italy during the 1996-2001 legislative term, almost one-fourth of MPs switched parties.[i] Even in countries famed for their party discipline such as Great Britain, there has always been much backbencher dissent and undisciplined free votes, especially among Conservatives during the 1970-74 Heath leadership. Party discipline in the UK can no longer be taken for granted. What is more, as research has shown, very few of these crises lead to the fall of a government and new elections.[ii] The horror of opposition politicians, uncritically amplified by large sectors of the media, at not calling new elections during the recent coalition crisis is then unjustified and leads to the wrong impression that democracy is and should be static.
The second falsehood concerns faulty definitions of political corruption that also emerge out of the static definition of politics appearing in many political commentaries. Political corruption does not consist of trying to find solutions to the patently illegal IOUs that financially bind legislators against their will to their original parties (as the media and the opposition wrongly define it). Political corruption in a democracy is defined by unclear party financing, especially when its sources are external (private) and not governmental. Most Western constitutions including the Polish one contain "free mandate clauses," which prohibit any non-political means of tying MPs to their parties. In Germany, Article 38, Section 1 of the Basic Law clearly states that the deputies of the German Bundestag "are representatives of the whole people, are not bound by orders and instructions and are subject only to their consciences." The Polish Constitution also enshrines the doctrine of the free mandate in Article 104, Section 1, which unequivocally states that "the MPs are the representatives of the Nation. They are not bound by the instructions of voters." Loyalty of the MPs in modern democracies is based on personal electoral calculation, the quality of party leadership, and faith in the party mission, not on monetary incentives or party instructions. Here the offer to legislatively solve the Self-Defense MPs obstacle to exercise their constitutionally-granted free mandates is to be congratulated rather than condemned. Indeed, the political corruption was the very existence of the IOUs rather than the attempts at their neutralization. It is worth noticing that current research by Anna Grzymała-Busse shows Polish party finance law (incidentally, vigorously supported by the ruling party) as one of the best in Central Europe.[iii] Moreover, the cooperation of MP Beger with a large private television network in an attempt to boost her popularity can raise justified suspicion about private sources of corruption in her case. These qualify as actual examples of political corruption - not party switching or efforts to circumvent a free mandate blockade. Unfortunately, these real abuses were hardly noticed by pundits and allowed the opposition to score political points.
Polish political commentators would benefit from learning a simple lesson about instability in legislative coalition politics that is quite normal in Western democracies. They should also criticize any attempts to curb the free mandate of legislators rather than praise informal connections between media and party backbenchers that can lead to private as well as public benefits to legislators outside of the rightful political realm. Polish sociologist Zdzisław Krasnodębski, quoting the famous German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, rightly noticed a few years back that mixing the autonomous systems of politics, media and society can lead to disastrous consequences. While politics is not static, we should leave its dynamics to the logic of the parliamentary logrolling game rather than spill it outside where it does not belong. But that is a subject for the next article and the next myth - that democracy is defined by transparency.
Maciej Golubiewski is an Associate Scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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[i] William B. Heller, Carol Mershon. "Party Switching in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1996-2001." The Journal of Politics. Vol. 67, No. 2, 2005.
[ii] Mark Franklin, Alison Baxter, Margaret Jordan. "Who Were the Rebels? Dissent in the House of Commons, 1970-1974." Legislative Studies Quarterly. Vol. 11, No. 2, 1986: 143-159.
[iii] Anna Grzymala-Busse. "Political Competition and the Politicization of the State in East Central Europe." Comparative Political Studies. Vol. 36, No. 10, 2003: 1123-1147.