Search results

Przedstawiany artykuł jest testem efektów, jakie przyniosło wprowadzenie przez kodeks wyborczy systemu większości względnej w okręgach jednomandatowych jako sposobu wyłaniania rad polskich gmin. Przeprowadzone badania pokazują, w jakim zakresie nowy system zmienił równowagę sił pomiędzy lokalnymi partiami władzy i ich konkurentami. Prowadzą one do wniosku, że partie władzy mają wyraźną przewagę nad pretendentami. Ma ona jednak złożony i warunkowy charakter. Zmiana systemu wyborczego powiększyła taką przewagę, jednak nie dotyczy to wszystkich kategorii gmin i wszystkich scenariuszy rywalizacji o władzę w samorządzie lokalnym. Obserwowane zmiany mają najpewniej nieoczywiste, złożone przyczyny. Generalnie jednak zmiana systemu uwypukliła problem integracji lokalnych ugrupowań politycznych i decydującą rolę, jaką ma na tym polu samo sprawowanie władzy. Analizy statystyczne dokonane zostały na podstawie danych zastanych – wyników wyborów samorządowych z 2010 i 2014 r. ; This article analyses the results of the implementation of the new role for a single mandatory constituency in the local election law in Poland. The investigation shows how the new role changes the balance of power between local leader parties and their competitors. It leads to a conclusion that parties holding power have explicit supremacy which is, however, of a complicated and conditional nature. The change of the voting system has strengthened this supremacy but its extend varies from municipality to municipality and is not present in all. The statistical analyses conducted for the purpose of this article have been based on the data contained in tables and graphs presenting the results of local elections in Poland in 2010 and 2014.

The article presents the determinants of creating candidate lists in European Parliament elections in Poland. Its subject context is the evaluation of importance of selected factors with reference to the effect obtained in the election. The main study hypothesis assumes different patterns of creating candidate lists in EP elections in comparison to parliamentary elections, involving the combined occurrence of several determinants. The first of them is the tendency to fill the highest positions in candidate lists with popular people well-known in the media, who have an advantage over anonymous ones. The second factor is territorial bonds connecting candidates with the electoral district where they stand for election. Another determinant taken into consideration is the territorial form of the candidate list. The last important element of analysis is the concentration o f support, determined by the position on the candidate list.

AbstractWe study the primacy effects that occur when voters cast their votes because a candidate or party is listed first on a ballot. In the elections that we analyzed, there are three potential types of such effects that might occur when voters vote for (1) the first candidate listed on the ballot in single-member district (SMD) elections (candidate primacy); (2) the first party listed on the ballot in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections (party primacy); or (3) the first candidate on a party list in OLPR elections (list primacy). We estimated the party primacy effect (2) and established that there was no interaction between (2) and (3). A party primacy effect is especially difficult to estimate because parties' positions on ballots are typically fixed in all multi-member districts (MMDs) and it is impossible to separate the first-position "bonus" from a party's normal electoral performance. A rare natural experiment allowed us to estimate the primacy party bonus between 6.02 and 8.52% of all votes cast for the 2014 Polish local elections. We attribute the large size of such bonus to the great complexity of voting in the OLPR elections, especially the much longer ballots, voting in many simultaneous elections, and ballot design as a booklet rather than a sheet.