Struggling with Pillarised Clientelism: Civil Society and Institutional Politics in Poland

While civic engagement has been central to shaping Poland’s political landscape since the Solidarity revolution in the 1980s, it is also strongly influenced by the political context and highly dependent on legal and economic changes. This dependence is well illustrated by the 2015 power shift, after which Polish state institutions took a strong populist turn in terms of managing their relationship with civil society. This was accompanied by the populistic narratives enabled by a series of international and domestic crises. While taking a closer look at the changing relationship between civic engagement and institutional politics, this chapter illustrates how this relationship has been influenced by gradual regime transformation resulting in democratic backsliding. It argues that civic engagement has been not only a part but also a driver of that change, because without some of the civil society actors legitimising right-wing government actions, populist parties would not be able to change social perceptions so successfully. While trying to understand the diversity of civic engagement in recent years, this chapter also acknowledges the tradition of clientelist relations between political and civic spheres, resulting in pillarisation—the vertical segregation of civil society into distinct compartments with limited interaction across political, religious, or social boundaries.