Dr hab. Adam Gendźwiłł’s project, funded in the competition for research projects at CESS

02 10 2024

The project of dr hab. Adama Gendźwiłł from the Faculty of Sociology “Skutki wyborcze kryzysu migracyjnego na granicy polsko-białoruskiej” (“Electoral consequences of the migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border”) was funded in the competition for research projects at the Centre of Excellence in Social Sciences.

The project received funding in the amount of 76 000,00 PLN.

The main aim of the project is to identify the impact of the migration crisis along the Polish-Belarusian border on electoral behaviour, in particular: (1) the level of voter participation, (2) support for the party leading the government (PiS) and (3) support for the extreme right-wing party (Konfederacja). The study has the potential to complement two developing strands of literature on voter behaviour. Firstly, the literature tracking the electoral consequences of voters’ exposure to different migrant groups, especially in the context of explaining the rising extremism and popularity of anti-establishment and populist parties. Secondly, the literature dealing with the political consequences of states of emergency, currently dominated by studies of authoritarian regimes or studies of the political consequences of natural disasters affecting selected regions.

The project will use quasi-experimental methods of causal inference based on the analysis of geocoded official results of the 2015-2023 parliamentary elections. Given the dynamics of the crisis, it can be expected that key exposure effects of local electorates occurred between the 2019 and 2023 elections. The distance of the voting districts (or municipalities) from the state border will be used as an instrumental variable. In turn, the border of the state of emergency, which is associated with restrictions on civil liberties and intense militarisation, will be used in a regression discontinuity design (RDD) scheme. In addition to estimating the cumulative impact of the migration crisis, the research project has the ambition to decompose the effect by potential mechanisms shaping voting behaviour – the analytical challenge will be to isolate the effect of exposure to the migration crisis, the effect of proximity to the border and the effect of the state of emergency.