Political Scientists’ Public Involvement and the Meanings of Democratic Education: Critical Questions from Poland

DOI:10.1017/S1049096522000117 The populist wave has not spared Poland. Since 2015, the United Right coalition, under the Law and Justice (PiS) party leadership, has subjugated key state institutions. It targeted the judiciary, media, and education system (Cervinkova and Rudnicki 2019). This can be perceived as an attempt at not only taking over key governmental positions but also shifting the political culture toward illiberal democracy—or even a soft authoritarianism with a significant conservative outlook (Bonet and Zamorano 2020; Hidalgo 2019; Markowski 2019; Nyyssönen and Jussi Metsälä 2020; Sajó 2019; Szczepański and Kalina 2019).Whereas responses came from various dissenting civil-society actors, including academics, the voice of political scientists as an organized community has been weak. Individual expert commentators provide critical analyses; however, compared to other social sciences, political science organizations contributed little in defense of democratic values. In this Spotlight, we explore political scientists’ public engagement and link it to the question of political science’s role in fostering democratic education in both academia and society at large. We begin with a brief history of the right-wing populist rule in Poland. Since its founding in 2001, the PiS has exploited social resentments and fears, defending victims of the capitalist transition and condemning those who benefited from it. Although the early PiS cabinets in 2005–2007 implemented rather neoliberal policies (e.g., effectively dismantling the progressive tax system), they remained committed to populism coupled with conservative propositions, including restrictions on reproductive rights, expanding “traditional values” in education (e.g., promoting the Catholic religion and suggesting that schools should instill traditional gender roles in girls and boys), and occasional suggestions that capital punishment should be restored. The party also used the politics of history by promoting uncritical nationalism—that is, “affirmative patriotism” based on an idealized vision of Poland’s and Poles’ history, which downplays discrimination of and violence toward the country’s ethnic and religious minorities in the twentieth century (Forecki 2018)—and ignoring difficult topics such as antisemitism in modern Poland. During the 2015 electoral campaign, parallel to the international humanitarian crisis, the PiS portrayed refugees as a threat to the country. It won the parliamentary elections in 2015 and 2019, and its presidential candidate also was reelected in 2020. The party’s control over the state-owned media is a critical factor in securing its successes. However, for its current supporters, the anti-neoliberal turn in social policies— unprecedented in post-transition history—as well as nationalism boosted by the PiS party’s rhetoric of sovereignty in the European Union andpolitics of history seem toovershadow the subjugation of the judiciary, neglect of the environment, decline of public services (e.g., health care and schooling), and hatred of LGBTQ people. Last but not least, the PiS party attempts to capture universities for its political purposes.Most recently, on state-owned television, the sitting Minister of Education and Science labeled participants of the gay-pridemarch “abnormal” and denied them “the same rights as normal people” (Sitnicka 2021). In this context, little intervention by the political science community is striking. Political scientists are present every day in the media, organize conferences, and publish studies on the Polish variant of authoritarian populism. Nevertheless, as a community organized in autonomous institutions and learned societies, political scientists seem to avoid direct involvement in protecting democratic political culture. We note that none of the major non-university institutions—the Polish Political Science Association (PPSA) and the Political Sciences Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PSCPAS) (not to be confused with the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Political Studies, a research institution)—issued a statement on the destruction of Poland’s democracy. The websites for both institutions do not show any trace of these activities. Moreover, the PPSA board meeting in late September 2015—during the anti-refugee campaign instigated by right-wing politicians—confirmed that the PPSA website should publish “only information on scholarly events” (Polish Political Science Association 2015). The board discussed the populist threat only at the February 2016 meeting: it decided on petitioning the government of Turkey in solidarity with the repressed Turkish political scientists, and it launched “a discussion on the political science community’s position on changes in Poland after the October 2015 elections. As a result of the discussion, it was proposed that the local chapters of the PPSA organize contradictory debates on the current political themes” (Polish Political Science Association 2016). In fact, this was the last PPSA board-meeting report displayed on the association’s website (as of February 2022). Among more than 150 news entries published by the PPSA between November 2015 and February 2021, only three are public statements. Two expressed the PPSA’s support for the PSCPAS’s intervention on the classification of political-science–related disciplines (e.g., political science, media and communication, and public policy) in the governmental reform of higher education and science (Polish Political Science Association 2018a, 2018b), and one was the PPSA board’s critical statement on predatory journals (Polish Political Science Association 2022). The PSCPAS website (knpol.pan.pl) contains several opinions on this reform. These interventions focus on the community’s self-interest, not on broader societal problems. Unlike the PPSA, the Polish Sociological Association (PSA) maintains a separate statements section online with 17 documents issued between May 2016 and May 2021. Statements included interventions against propagandistic abuse of the state-controlled