Institutional Change and Persistence: The Origins and Evolution of Poland's Electoral System 1989-2001

Institutions shape political outcomes, yet institutions themselves are endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. Electoral systems are a unique class of distributive institutions that fundamentally shape political competition and political outcomes in democratic polities. Our paper examines the origins and subsequent changes to the Polish electoral system from the semi-free election in 1989 to the elections scheduled for Fall 2001. In Poland, the process of consolidating the party system has involved not just competing parties adapting to electoral institutions in each election, but also active competition prior to each election by parties seeking to reshape these institutions to their partisan benefit. We develop a model of derived preferences that explains institutional choice as the product of bargaining among parties concerned with electoral self-interest. We compare this model to electoral system choices in the roundtable talks producing the rules for the 1989 semi-free elections and in the Sejm debates over the electoral systems used in the elections of 1991, 1993, 1997, and (scheduled) 2001 parliamentary elections. To test the model we construct an analytic narrative around each account, examining opinion polls, constitutional committee debates, relative party strengths in the Sejm faction sizes, proposed and actual election law changes, and first-hand accounts of political actors involved in the process of designing and choosing electoral institutions. Our findings show a clear and direct link between parties seeking to maximize their expected seat shares with perceived partisan effects of election laws. * Prepared for delivery at the ecpr2001 General Conference, University of Kent, Canterbury, September 6-8, 2001. A replication dataset for this paper consisting of interview transcripts, survey data, and parliamentary fraction data are available from the authors upon request. Research for this project was supported by a grant of the Social Sciences Research Council of the Irish Royal Academy. We thank Josh Tucker and John Ishiyama for comments; Anna Gwiazda for superb research assistance; and Hanna Popowska of the Library and Information Services Division of the Polish Sejm for invaluable help with legislation and roll call voting. † Department of Political Science, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland. E-mail: [email protected] and [email protected]. INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE AND PERSISTENCE -p2