Dr. Tomasz Warczok’s project, funded in the competition for research projects at CESS

29 01 2024

The project by Dr. Tomasz Warczok from the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences and Resocialisation, “Social classes and political cleavages in Poland – a relational approach”, was funded in the competition for research projects at the Centre of Excellence in Social Sciences.

The project received funding in the amount of 75,387.00 PLN.

Project description: Along with systemic changes after 1989, social inequalities began to increase; new and varied political ideas and ideological stances also began to crystallise. Importantly, these inequalities concern income and wealth, as well as education, knowledge, or consumer habits. Therefore, the research carried out in the project will present these disparities as complex social classes, not only referring to the well-known hierarchy (of upper, middle, lower classes, etc.), but also other divisions (intelligentsia/businesspeople, public sector/private sector, etc.). Above all, it will be examined how this multidimensional class-divide translates into political attitudes, party preferences, and overall assessments of reality. In other words, it will seek an answer to the question as to whether differences in wealth may explain differences in worldview and political preference, or whether other explanatory factors should be considered, such as those related to religiousness, gender, age, and place of residence.

Importantly, the subjective classifications of the social players themselves will be reconstructed. This will help determine what the main social divisions in Poland are, in the eyes of Poles themselves (rich versus poor, educated versus uneducated, city dwellers versus country dwellers, and so forth), and whether that perception of the social realm depends on one’s class position, and thus on one’s resources (both material and immaterial).