Does Attending Mass Make you Anticommunist? Evidence from Public Opinion Surveys in Poland 1985-19901

Version: March 17, 2015.

Monika Nalepa and Grigore Pop-Eleches

The University of Chicago Princeton University

Abstract: This paper traces the evolution of anti-communist attitudes in Poland by examining the effect of religiosity, measured by mass attendance, on such attitudes. Between 1795 and 1918 the so-called Partitions divided Poland among three empires: Habsburg, Prussia, and Russia. In addition, following WW2, the agreement struck between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt in Yalta, shifted Poland’s borders roughly 50% to the West, forcing millions of people to resettle. In recent years, scholars have uncovered a relationship between these historical legacies and voting behavior following the democratic transition in 1989. Others have pointed to the spurious nature of this relationship and attributed systematic voting differences to differences in development, such as greater industrialization of the Prussian partition, and to greater church attendance in the Habsburg partition. In our analysis, we focus not on voting behavior itself, but its prerequisite—political attitudes and study these attitudes prior to the democratic transition. We find that although these historical legacies themselves explain some of the variation in anti-communist attitudes, church attendance significantly modifies their effect on dissident attitudes. Tracing the Post-war history of Catholic-State relations, we develop a theory of why attending mass would not generate the same amount of dissidence throughout Poland. We find that having a longer history of independence increases the church’s effectiveness in spreading the “anti-communist gospel.” To test our theory, we analyze a set of ten surveys carried out on representative national samples in Poland between 1985 and 1989. Specifically, frequent church attendance has a considerably stronger anti-communist effect in areas with the longest Polish autonomy (due to being part of the Duchy of Warsaw, the Krakow Republic, and inter-war Poland) than in former German areas that were resettled after the Yalta Treaty.

1 The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Princeton Library in obtaining data for this project. A draft of this paper was presented at APSA in 2014. The authors wish to thank Ana Arjona, Rachel Beaty Riedl, and Noam Lupu provided excellent comments. We wish to thank Chris Winters for ArcGIS consultation and Sam Brown for research assistance.

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Introduction

How do historical legacies affect the potential for religious organizations, such as the Catholic

Church, to influence their followers’ approval or disapproval of authoritarian rulers?

A number of scholars in recent years have tackled this question with regard to the PRI in Mexico

(Trejo 2012), and communist rule in Hungary (Wittenberg 2006), as well as in Russia and China

(Koesel 2014). [More on these contributions here]

In this paper, we focus on the role of the Catholic Church in Poland. The Communist

authorities tried very hard to turn this organization into an ally in establishing their dominance

over the country, but ultimately failed. Some scholars (see Grzymala-Busse forthcoming)

attribute this failure to the “fusion” between nationalism and religion in Poland going back to as

early as the 17th century (when the Catholic Church defended the Polish nation from the Swedish

invasion).2 In Nations Under God, she points out that because up until 1945 Poland was a “multi-

linguistic, multiethnic, and multi-denominational” country, the link between Polish and Catholic

identity was not complete until the post-Yalta resettlement project left Poland ethnically and

religiously homogeneous.

It is this very resettlement project that urged us to research deeper into the mechanism

through which mass attendance arouses dissidence in religious followers. The massive exodus of

1945 from what used to be Eastern Poland prior to World War II to the so-called “recovered

territories,”3 meant that not all Catholic Parishes were equally well-rooted in their communities

and some of these communities were far from stable. Although Communist authorities created

financial incentives encouraging Poles to resettle formerly German and Jewish owned towns and 2 Subsequently, the Church repeatedly placed itself as a defender of the Nation, from Turks, Tartars, Germans, and Russians (Barker 2009).3 Recovered (or “regained”) territories is euphemism that denotes land that was absorbed by Poland following the 1945 Yalta Treaty

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villages, these incentives proved too weak to make repatriated Poles stay longer than just a

couple of years.

Disaggregating the effect of church attendance to take into account historical legacies is

warranted also in light of a broad consensus in the literature on the effect of Partitions on post-

communist voting in Poland. The term “Partitions” (pl, Zabory) is used to describe the period

when Poland was divided between the Prussian, Habsburg and Russian empires. To date, several

articles have demonstrated the long and lasting effect that the legacy of Partitions had on

political attitudes and electoral voting behavior following the transition to democracy (Davies

2005, Wolff 2010). For instance, following the 1995 presidential elections Marek Barwinski

(U.M., n/a) discovered a clear pattern of voting in favor of successor-communist Presidential

candidate Aleksander Kwasniewski in the Recovered Territories as well as the Russian partition.

At the same time, the Habsburg partition was most favorable to the former dissident candidate,

Lech Walesa. Analyses of subsequent elections continued to document regularities in voting

behavior reflecting the partition of Poland among Habsburg, Prussia, and Russia (Rykiel 2011,

Bartkowski 2003, Zarycki 1999, 2000, 2007, Janicki and Wladyka 2005, Sleszynski 2007).

Krzysztof Jasiewicz (2009) writes about the role of the Partitions as the key historical predictors

of electoral behavior: “Ninety years after the rebirth of an independent Poland (and sixty after

the end of World War II), the old partitions still coincide with current politics” (492). He

demonstrates how living in territories that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were

controlled by Prussia, coincides with voting in support of joining the EU in 2003, and---in 2005

and 2007---with supporting Civic Platform (PO), while residing in the former provinces of the

Austrian and Russian empires (with the exception of big cites, such as Warsaw, Łodz and

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Krakow) correlates with EU resistance in 2003 and subsequent support for the Law and Justice

(PiS), in 2005 and 2007, respectively (Jasiewicz 2009).

More recently, Irena Grosfeld and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya (2013) have scrutinized this

relationship using regression discontinuity design and shown that the correlations between

empires and voting in post-transition Poland are largely spurious. They argue that the

relationship between partition legacy and voting is driven by the omitted variables of

industrialization (the infrastructure built by Prussians in the 19th century), on the one hand, and

church attendance (which tends to be higher in lands controlled by the former Habsburg empire),

on the other. 4

Despite this relative consistency of the empirical findings linking historical legacies to

voting behavior, there is a paucity of theorizing about mechanisms through which historical

events dating back two centuries ago would be influencing patterns of electoral voting behavior.

Suggesting such pathways of transmission is particularly challenging because they have to

include the communist period, during which, due to limits on the right to contest in elections,

voting behavior was not meaningful (Dahl 1973). In light of this, any such mechanism would

require evidence of legacies shaping attitudes under communism.

Following the recent literature on the role of churches under authoritarianism (Wittenberg

2006, Trejo 2012, Koesel 2014, Grzymala-Busse, forthcoming), we explore various ways by

which the mechanism for nurturing dissident attitudes may operate through church attendance. In

particular we explore three possibilities:

4 At the same time, Grosfeld and Zhuravskaya do find thst partition borders help understand how voters behave when confronted with issues falling on either side of the so-called “Regime Divide” (term used to describe a legacy-based political cleavage that separates supporters of the successors of the former communist regime from descendants of the dissident opposition, see Grzymala-Busse 2001). Specifically, if one conceptualizes the main dimensions of electoral behavior in Poland as attitudes to liberalism on the one hand, and to the communist past, on the other, one can find a discontinuous jump at the border between the Russian and Prussian partitions, with higher voting levels for successor communist parties in the Russian than in the Prussian partition. They also find a similar discontinuity along the Habsburg and Russian border, with the anti-communist vote higher on the Habsburg side.

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1. First, historical legacies can determine the extent to which Church-goers trust their preachers. Even if the sermons are comparable in anti-communist content, the reception of the anti-communist gospel may be weaker where trust in the Catholic Church is lower.

2. Second, in different regions, priests could have been delivering different messages from the pulpit. Their sermons may have been more anti-communist in areas that had a longer tradition of Polish independent statehood or that had been under the control of imperial powers more favorable to Catholicism. For instance, of the three empires, only the Habsburgs were Catholic, and thus allowed Poles extensive religious freedoms. Meanwhile, the Prussians and especially Russians, openly repressed the use of Polish in Catholic religious practice (Kieniewicz 1998). It is plausible therefore, that religious participation in the Habsburg empire would reinforce Polish patriotism, because priests there were free to use Polish in their sermons and offer religious instruction in Polish. To use the language of Anna Grzymala-Busse, variation in the extent to which Catholicism was fused with nationalism across Poland could be responsible the effectiveness of the church-attendance in shaping anti-communist attitudes (Grzymala-Busse forthcoming).

3. Third, a different degree of church personnel rootedness could be responsible for the effectiveness in preaching the anti-communist gospel. Priests who had been resettled or transferred due to the communist authorities’ dismissal or arrest of their predecessor could be reluctant to engage in anti-communist rhetoric because unlike priests with long tenures in their parishes they did not know the political views of their congregations and the relative risks of anti-communist messages from the pulpit were greater.

In the following section, we elaborate on each of these mechanisms in detail and develop a set of

testable hypotheses. It is useful here to present the baseline results motivating this investigation.

First, as the table below illustrates, it is indeed the case that church attendance is higher in the

territories that have continuously belonged to the Habsburg Empire—close to 70 % - while it

was the lowest in the territories Poland gained from Germany post-WWII.

Historical legacy Not regularly religious Regularly religious

Habsburg 30.05 69.95

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Habsburg-Russia 41.73 58.27

Habsburg-Free 39.41 60.59

Prussia 47.93 52.07

Prussia-Russia 53.63 46.37

Recovered Territories

53.90 46.10

Totals 48 52

Table 1: The Importance of regular religious practice by region (CBOS combined surveys)

However, once we compare the pro-opposition and anti-PZPR attitudes among Church goers in

the Recovered Territories and in Krakow—the area with the longest history of Polish

independence, we see that imperial legacies explain not just average levels of political attitudes

but also moderate the impact of regular religious practice. Specifically, frequent church

attendance is associated with stronger anti-communist attitudes in areas with the longest Polish

autonomy (inter-war Poland, the Duchy of Warsaw and especially the Krakow Republic) but has

a modest effect on both PZPR and Solidarity support in areas that were resettled after the Yalta

Treaty.

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 Note: Data come from ten CBOS surveys, described in detail on pages 13-14 and the Appendix. Each one of the surveys asks respondents about their attitudes to the anti-communist opposition (understood by and large as support for the Solidarity trade union) and their support for the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), as the Polish authoritarian communist party was called after the merger of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) with the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) in December 15, 1948 (Kersten 1991).

The remainder of paper is organized as follows. The next section explains how

participating in the activities of the Catholic Church could foster anti-communist attitudes and

sheds light on the ways in which imperial legacies could alter the Church’s capacity to mold

subjects into dissidents. The third section conceptualizes historical legacies in Poland and

proposes different ways of measuring them. Here we present ArcGIS traced maps to discus our

main historical independent variables—the Partitions, along with territorial shifts resulting from

other focal moments in Polish history: the Napoleonic Wars, the Spring of Nations, the Great

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War and The Yalta Treaty of 1945. The fourth section is devoted to statistical analysis and a

discussion of our findings that the historical legacies have an intervening effect on how the

Catholic Church fostered anticommunist attitudes in pre-transition Poland. In this section we also

test the mechanisms through which Church attendance produces dissident atittudes. Section five

concludes.

2. Why Church Attendance Matters?

The question that emerges from studying Figure 1 is what is the specific mechanism through

which Church attendance matters for PZPR support. We first explore the possibility that

attending mass is less effective in generating anti-communist attitudes because parishioners have

weaker trust towards their priests in some areas, but not others.

This differential trust levels could have been driven by the uneven success the communist

authorities had with controlling the activities of the Catholic Church in Poland. The period of the

greatest repression against the Catholic Church falls in the years 1946-1956, when the

communists created a special Section for Priests within Society of Fighters for Freedom and

Democracy (Sekcja Księży przy ZBOWiD). Informally, the section was referred to as the

“Patriot Priests” (Księża Patrioci). The idea was to recruit as collaborators and sympathizers up

to 10 percent of the clergy in Poland, mostly among the lower ranking clergy, who might be

disgruntled about the upper echelons of the centralized church hierarchy and the power of

bishops over the rank and file. A second group of targets were former concentration camp

prisoners and priests who had survived Gestapo arrests. The regime’s secret police believed that

such extreme experiences would predispose them to view the communist liberators with

sympathy and gratitude. The activities of the Patriot Priests were steered by the Polish United

Workers Party, which prepared sample sermons for the priests and advised them on how to deal

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the “tyrant” power of the Vatican and how to handle orders from the Episcopate. Yet the group

had a plethora of nominal executive and legislative bodies, allowing us to reconstruct from the

organization’s documents (at the moment and counting) sixty six priests in the leadership of the

organization in its heyday. According to a collection of Special Reports produced by the Munich

section of Radio Free Europe, between 1949 and 1956 about 905 priests participated in the

activities of the Patriotic Priests (Zurek 2003). These activities included publishing a weekly

newspaper and a number of conferences and retreats.

Given that the Patriotic Priests movement had an anti-establishment bend, areas with a

short tradition of Polish Catholicism were easier to penetrate. For instance following the

redrawing of Polish borders, the Vatican refused to appoint Polish bishops to the Recovered

Territories claiming that the dioceses already were staffed by bishops. These members of the

Catholic hierarchy had been forcefully removed along with 3,45 million Germans between 1945

and 1949. As a result, the Catholic Church in the Recovered Territories was led by a set of

temporary apostolic administrators, who had neither the charisma nor the authority of bishops

consecrated through the traditional process. Unsurprisingly, the Recovered territories were well

infiltrated by the “Patriots” (Zurek, 2009).

A second liability associated with being part of a diocese located in the Recovered Territories

was insecurity of Church property in those lands. In accordance with decrees expelling Germans

and expropriating German property, the communist state in Poland laid claims to real estate and

land owned by the Catholic Church in the Recovered territories. Between 1945 and 1972, Peter

Raina reported numerous exchanges between the Episcopate and the Communist government

regarding the status of Church buildings and land. It is highly likely that this insecurity made the

temporary apostolic administrators much more vulnerable to pressures from the communist party

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and made them less likely to be perceived as trustworthy representatives of an independent

minded Catholic Church. The above reasoning leads us to the following expectation:

2.1. Weaker trust in resettled territories: Lower levels of trust towards the Catholic Church

and its hierarchy characterized lands that had been part of Poland for a shorter period and

these lower trust levels are the drivers of the increased effect of church attendance on

dissident attitudes.

The next mechanism we investigate is that of differential messages from the pulpit. If we

look at the composition of the church leadership as well as the lay personnel in the church, we

indeed observe that the priests working in territories that had been resettled after World War II

were less likely to be broadcastin an anticommunist message. This could depend on where they

were trained, who ordained them, or in the case of bishops, who their consecrators were.

The opportunities for fusing nationalism with religion (Grzymała-Busse forthcoming)

varied across areas defined by the partitions and their legacies in ways associated with policies of

the 19th century empires---Prussia, Russia, and Austria---towards their occupied territories. For

instance, while the Habsburgs were most willing to tolerate Polish autonomy in their partition

and were relatively progressive while doing away with the remnants of feudalism, the Russians,

in contrast, actually reinstated some of the feudal institutions. They also restricted the use of

Polish language and used a specific combination of carrots and sticks to “russify” Poles,

including rewards to Poles who chose to be loyal to the Tsar and severe punishments of those

who adhered to their Polish ethnicity and religion. The Prussians did not try to convert Poles into

Germans, but uniformly prosecuted the use of Polish language. While they did away for the most

part with the remnants of feudalism, their policies severely impoverished landowning noblemen

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(szlachta) contributing to the urbanization of Polish elites (Kieniewicz 1998), which in turn may

have weakened the societal penetration of Catholic church ideas.

Second, turning to the bottom-up determinants of church effectiveness, churchgoers may

exhibit differences in nationalistic attitudes. This too would affect the extent to which the fusion

between nationalism and religion could produce dissident attitudes.

Furthermore, in light of the fact that communist rule in 1948 was viewed by many Poles as

Soviet occupation (some referred to the Yalta agreement as “the fourth partition of Poland; see

Kersten 1991), this legacy could translate decades later into an association between the

frequency of church attendance and anti-communist dissidence. For example the first step

towards advancing the goals of the Patriot Priests was the removal in 1951 of five apostolic

administrators whom the communist regime felt were “unsympathetic” to the communist cause.

Administrators in Wroclaw, Opole, Gorzow, Gdansk and Olsztyn---all in the Recovered

Territories--- and their replacement with cherry-picked clerics whom the communists believed

would cooperate with the regime. Stefan Wyszynski sanctioned the choice fearing that if he

refused, it could lead to a schism (Potkaj 2002). This leads us to the following hypothesis:

2:2: Weaker effectiveness of the anti-communist gospel in the recovered territories:

Because the Church’s ability to broadcast an effective anticommunist message depends on how

deep the association (or “fusion”) between nationalism and religiosity runs, we would expect

church attendance to increase dissident attitudes at a higher rate where leaders were trained in

more traditionally Polish schools and where parishioners had more nationalistic attitudes.

A third and final mechanism we consider rests on the different degree of rootedness of the

church personnel across the parishes of Poland in a way that reflects its historical legacies. The

ability to preach the anti-communist gospel could vary with tenure and turnover of priests and

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bishops across the historically defined regions as well as by their experiences during World War

II. This pertains especially to areas that were incorporated into Poland after Yalta, never having

been settled by Poles before. Some authors describe the communist resettlement project carried

out between 1945 and 1948 as an ethnic cleansing (Curp 2006). Most German residents were

given two days to leave. Following their departure, the territories were resettled primarily by

Polish refugees from the Eastern parts of interwar Poland, which had now been annexed by the

Soviet Union. Krystyna Kersten documents that by the end of 1945, 817, 000 people---297, 000

of them in the cities and another 520,000 in the countryside—moved to the recovered territories.

Her analysis of the consequence of this resettlement is best summarized in the following

paragraph “The effects of this movement were far-reaching. Traditional structures and patterns

of life were destroyed or badly eroded, social ties within the family, among neighbors, and in

localities were weakened. The uprooting of millions of people from their environments and the

necessity of adjusting to a new situation had an immeasurable effect on attitudes and behavior.

This was an important cause in weakening resistance to the communist authorities” (1991, 165).

Kersten posits that the cause of this weakened resistance was the fact that newly resettled Poles

“grew ties to the new authorities.” We believe however, that in addition to that, the natural

centers of community life, such as churches, functioned differently than in areas that had been

continuously Polish. First, participants in religious practices were less familiar with each other.

But more importantly, the priests themselves did not have long-established ties to their

communities and may have steered clear from enticing anti-communist resistance. This leads us

to our final hypothesis, whichcan be stated as:

2.3: Weaker embeddedness of Church leaders in Recovered Territories: Church leaders, who as

the clergy in the Recovered Territories were less rooted in their communities had a smaller effect

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on expressions of pro-PZPR or pro-Solidarity attitudes among their parishioners, where this lack

of rootedness may have originated in their personal history of resettlement or concentration camp

experiences.

To test these predictions, we take advantage of a unique set of surveys conducted in

Poland between March 1985 and January 1989, at more or less regular intervals. 5 All surveys

were carried out by the Center for Public Opinion Research (CBOS), a polling company created

in the aftermath of the rise of the dissident trade union Solidarity, after the authorities realized

that relying on reports from the secret police alone left them unprepared for outbreaks of popular

dissidence. As a result, the surveys offer a unique opportunity for understanding the dynamics of

regime support and opposition in the final years of communist rule in Poland. For reasons

outlined in the Appendix and elsewhere (Nalepa and Pop-Eleches 2013), we believe that these

surveys do not suffer from the usual bias and distortions that are present in surveys conducted in

authoritarian settings (Darden and Grzymala-Busse 2006, Kaminski 1999, Sulek 1994, Robbins

and Tessler 2012, Jamal and Tessler 2008, Tessler 2002, Bellin 2012). Critically, the surveys

identify respondents up to the level of “wojewodztwo”, which is one of the 49 administrative

units that the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) was divided into at the time. Moreover, each one

of the surveys asks respondents about their attitudes to the anti-communist opposition

(understood by and large as support for the Solidarity trade union) and their support for the

Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), as the Polish authoritarian communist party was called

after the merger of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) with the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) in

December 15, 1948 (Kersten 1991).6 Finally, among key demographic questions, the surveys ask

5 The surveys were conducted in irregular intervals, with more time between surveys closer to 1985 and more frequent surveys as the transition approached. 6 PZPR survived until November 1990, at which point in reinvented itself into the Social-Democratic Party of Poland (SDRP) (Grzymala-Busse 2002).

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respondents about their religiosity as well as trust towards the Catholic Church and their

nationalism. We were able to use statistical yearbooks published in Poland between 1985 and

1989 to supplement these data with wojewodztwo-level macro-economic indicators of capital

investments, fixed assets and marketed production. Finally, we constructed an original database

on Polish bishops and apostolic administrators from 1946-1990, which includes their tenure,

education, their incarceration history (including concentration camps, as well as Gestapo and

communist prisons) and where they were ordained into priesthood and who consecrated them as

bishops.

The combination of these three data sources, allows us to investigate the puzzle of why

Church attendance operates differently in producing anti-communist attitudes in Polish

territories that are characterized by different historical legacies. The next section details our

conceptualization and measuring these historical legacies.

3. Conceptualizing and Measuring the Partitions

Twenty years before 1795, Poland was one of the largest states in Europe and had just

embarked on a series of social and political reforms inspired by the Enlightenment era. National

awareness among its citizens was at its peak when its territory became absorbed by the

Habsburg, Prussian, and Russian empires commencing a 123-year period of the, so called,

Partitions. Each of the three empires brought a different set of institutions and policies for

dealing with ethnic minorities, which under their rule, the Poles had just become (Mylonas,

2013). Specifically in the case of Poland, Prussia, being the most developed economically of the

three, industrialized its partition more heavily than the Habsburg and Russian empires. Poles

residing in the Habsburg partition, meantime, enjoyed more linguistic and cultural autonomy.

Tolerating religious and ethnic rights may have come easier to the Habsburgs, as the religion of

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the empire was Catholicism, in contrast to Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia. Yet, in the

Russian partition, more so than under Prussian occupation, the prosecution of Polish patriotism

went hand in hand with the oppression of Catholic religious practice.

Furthermore, the Partitions era itself was broken up by focal events, at least three of which

deserve scrutiny. The first was the rise of Napoleon, which resulted in the creation of a fairly

independent “Duchy of Warsaw,” a small state erected in 1807 made up of 6 departments,

expanded to 10 in 1809. The second was Napoleon’s downfall, which resulted in downscaling

the Duchy to a small, but still autonomous “Krakow Republic” and the “Polish Kingdom,” a

euphemism for an extension of the Russian Partition. The third was Spring of Nations, which led

to a major uprising in Małopolska that was crushed by the Habsburgs put an end to the Krakow

autonomy (Kieniewicz 1998). In 1918, Poland regained independence and recovered some of its

territories subsumed by the partitions before promptly falling into a nationalist dictatorship. The

end of World War II brought another redrawing of Polish borders, this time through agreements

made by the Allied powers in Yalta. The upshot of this historical turmoil is that in addition to

exposure to the three different empires, some parts of what became communist Poland

accumulated more years of independence than others. The starkest contrast is illustrated by

Krakow and Wroclaw --the 2nd and 4th largest cities in contemporary Poland, respectively.

Between 1772 and 1945, Wroclaw had zero years of Polish independence, as it was part of the,

so called, “recovered territories,” an area resettled following the Treaty of Yalta. Krakow, in

contrast, accumulated 58 years of independence---6 years as part of the Duchy of Warsaw, 31 as

part of the free Krakow Republic and 21 in interwar Poland. Taking into account the full

historical trajectory of different parts of Poland allows us to parse out the effect of imperial

legacy from the effect of accumulated years of independence.

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3.1. Measuring Imperial legacies

To capture Poland’s complicated imperial legacies, we take advantage of the fact that each

respondent in our surveys is coded as residing in one of 49 wojewodztwa.

We then use maps with historical boundaries to assign these administrative units to six

regions defined by the changing historical boundaries of the Russian, Prussian and Habsburg

empires. Although in the 18th century, Poland had been divvied up between these three empires,

the territory of the original Russian partition is not part of present-day Poland. After World War

II, Poland’s borders shifted by, roughly, 50 percent to the west, and new territories that were

never Polish, but had always belonged to Prussia became part of modern-day Poland and were

called, euphemistically, by the Communists “Recovered (or regained) Territories.” However, in

1815 and later, in 1848, significant territories making up the Prussian partition and a small part

of the Habsburg partition were acquired by Russia, initially under the protectorate of Krolestwo

Polskie (The Kingdom of Poland). Thus, our partitions variable has six categories:(1) “regained

territories,” (2) “Prussia” which consisted of territories that were part of the Prussian empire after

17977 but were part of the Second Polish Republic in the interwar period (3) “Prussia-Russia”,

consisting of territories in Eastern and Central Poland that were under Prussian control following

the Third Partition but were incorporated in the Russian empire in 1815, (4) “Habsburg-Russia”

consisting of territories that initially belonged to the Habsburg empire but were later ceded to

Russia; (5) “Habsburg” corresponding to territories that remained in the Habsburg empire from

1797-1918, and (6) Krakow-Habsburg reflecting the unique legacy of the city of Krakow and its

surroundings, which were part of an independent city-state from 1815-1846 before being fully

incorporated into the Habsburg empire (Kieniewicz 1998). These are illustrated in Map 1, below

7 Although the final of the three Polish partitions took place in 1795, the Delimitation Treaty was not signed by the three powers until 1797 (Kieniewicz 1998)

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However, these detailed geographic groupings ultimately combine a number of different

dimensions along which different territories vary, and which may affect political attitudes

through different mechanisms. First, in line with our earlier discussion, it is conceivable that the

variation in communist/anti-communist attitudes in Poland can be traced back to the different

nature of imperial rule in the Russian, Prussian and Habsburg empires.

To test the possibility that the three imperial legacies would have produced differences in

declared attitudes to the opposition and the PZPR, we can classify respondents based on which

empire their wojewodztwo belonged to for most of the 1797-1918 period. This approach

produces the categorization illustrated in Map 2 below.

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However, as mentioned above, the different areas of present-day Poland differ not only with

respect to the nature of their imperial legacies but also with respect to how long they were

subjected to imperial rule. To capture this variation we calculated the number of years that each

województwo was part of an independent Polish state between 1797 and 1939. As illustrated by

Map 3 below, this variable primarily captures the difference between the “recovered territories”

on the one hand, which were not part of Poland pre-1939, and the noticeably longer independent

statehood of Krakow and its surroundings, which experienced an additional three decades of

independence in the 19th century compared to the rest of Poland. The remaining territories all

have the 21 years of independent statehood from 1918-39 and only differ in whether and for how

long they also belonged to the (semi-)independent Duchy of Warsaw during the Napoleonic

period (1807-1815).

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Finally, we want to capture the possibility that what sets much of the recovered territories apart

from the rest of Poland may be neither their Prussian history or lack of pre-communist Polish

independence experience but rather the fact that most of these areas experienced massive

population movements after WWII, as millions of Germans were forced to leave and were

replaced by Polish (and to a lesser extent Ukrainian) refugees from the East (Curp 2006). While

precise data on the number or shares of settlers are not available at the wojewodztwo level, we

have estimated the share of Germans in different areas before 1939 using three broad categories

(below 50%, between 50-90% and over 90%) and will use these shares as proxies for the

magnitude of post-WWII population resettlements. The geographic distribution of such areas,

which corresponds closely (but not perfectly) to the recovered territories, is illustrated in Map 4

below.

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Statistical Analysis

Below, we use ten surveys carried out on representative national samples in Poland between June

1985 (18 months after the end of Martial Law) and November 1989 (4 months after the creation

of the first non-communist led cabinet in Poland) to examine the effect of imperial legacies,

religious attendance, and the interaction between the two in driving political support patterns in

late-communist Poland. The dependent variables are based on two survey questions that asked

respondents to evaluate the extent to which the PZPR (the ruling communist party) and the anti-

communist opposition served the interest of society.8 The questions allowed for five categories

8 The question was also asked for a broader range of institutions (including the army, Catholic Church and parliament), and even public persons (such as Lech Walesa) and while we analyze this broader set of political support indicators in greater detail elsewhere (Nalepa and Pop-Eleches 2013) we chose a narrower focus in this paper due to both space considerations and because some questions were only asked in a limited number of surveys.

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(ranging from "absolutely not" to "definitely yes").9 Since the DVs are ordinal and non-normally

distributed, the statistical tests in this paper are based on ordered probit regressions.

Our main variable of interest for our present analysis is church attendance. While the CBOS

surveys included an answer with multiple categories, for the purposes of our current analysis the

most important distinction is between regular church-goers and others. Regular church-goers

account for roughly over half of the respondents in the CBOS surveys but, as Map 5 below

illustrates, church attendance tended to be noticeably higher in the East than in the West

(particularly in the Western recovered territories.)

Additional controls

9 The response options included a “hard to say” option, which we treat as neutral in the present analysis (given that no other neutral option was provided in the question wording). However, our findings are not affected if we treat the “hard-to-say” responses as missing data (results available upon request).

21

Since the crisis of the communist regime was closely intertwined with the severe economic

downturn Poland experienced in the 1980s we need to control for changes in economic

conditions. Using Poland’s statistical yearbook, we have collected województwo-level data on

(1) capital industrial investments (2) Fixed industrial assets and (3) Marketed production. Finally,

we control for a host of demographic variables, such as gender, age, education

(primary/vocational, secondary and higher education), a detailed set of professional positions and

locality size.

Results

As a first step, we want to establish in a baseline model that the effect of church attendance on

political support for the PZPR and the opposition is indeed conditioned by the historical

partitions. As we noticed in Map 5 above, church attendance varied significantly across imperial

boundaries. However, as we argued, there are good theoretical reasons to expect the role of the

Catholic Church to vary as a function of the historical trajectories of different areas. In particular,

we would expect church attendance to matter less in the recovered territories, where the Catholic

Church had weaker historical roots than in Krakow-Habsburg because much of the region had

been predominantly Protestant pre-WWII. Even though the new settlers were overwhelmingly

Catholic, and many of them attended church, we may expect less cohesive church-community

ties in the resettled frontier areas of Western Poland than in the rest of the country, where

churches were more thoroughly imbedded in Polish society.

To test this we interacted the regular church attendance indicator with the historical region

dummies. In line with expectations we found a statistically significant positive interaction effect

between church attendance and recovered territories in model 1 of Table 2 which suggests that

the anti-communist effect of Catholic Church attendance was attenuated in those areas.

22

Similarly, in model 2 we found a negative and significant interaction effect for opposition

evaluations, which once again suggests the lower political effectiveness of the Catholic Church

in the newly acquired Polish territories.

[Table 2 about here]

Since multiple interaction terms are difficult to interpret on the basis of regression

coefficients, and since it is difficult to evaluate substantive effects in ordered probit models, we

present the results from models 1 & 2 in graph form. Figure 2 shows the estimates and 95%

confidence intervals for the difference between the shares of respondents with positive vs.

negative evaluations of the Opposition for different combinations of church attendance and

historical regions. The most striking pattern in Figure 2 is the much smaller difference between

regular church-goers and other respondents in the Recovered Territories: not only is the

magnitude of the effect less than half of the corresponding difference in most other regions –

especially compared to Habsburg/Free (Krakow) and Habsburg Russia – but it is also the only

region where the difference fails to achieve statistical significance. Relatedly, Figure 1 suggests

that the stronger PZPR support in the Recovered Territories was much more pronounced among

regular church-goers than among other citizens (whose PZPR support was statistically

indistinguishable from regions with noticeably lower overall PZPR support, such as Habsburg-

Russia.) It is also worth noting the consistently low PZPR support among church-goers in the

areas that at some point belonged to the Habsburg empire, which suggests a greater social

embeddedness and anti-communist political impact of the Church in those areas.

23

Habsburg

Habsburg-Russia

Habsburg/Free

Prussia

Prussia-Russia

Recovered Territories

-20% -10% 0% 10% 20%Net evaluations of Opposition (%favorable-%unfavorable)

Regular church goers Others

Fig. 2: Opposition Evaluations by Region & Church Attendance

The difference in the combined effects of church attendance between the Recovered

Territories and the Habsburg/ Free Region on the one hand and Prussia on the other is

statistically significant, as demonstrated below:

Support for PZPR Coefficient Std. Error P>|z| Confidence IntervalRecovered -Territories Habsburg/Free

.1689399 .0813895 0.038 .0094194 .3284605

Recovered Territories - Prussia

.1017324 .0503664 0.043 .003016 .2004488

Having established the different political effects of church attendance in different historical

regions of Poland, we next turn to the question of which aspect of these different historical

trajectories seem to have been most salient in shaping the anti-communist effectiveness of the

Catholic Church. The results of the 8 models (not shown here) are summarized graphically in

Figure 3:

24

%Germans<90% - Others

%Germans<90% - Churchgoers

%Germans>90% - Others

%Germans>90% - Churchgoers

Long pre-comm indep. - Others

Long pre-comm indep. - Churchgoers

Medium pre-comm indep. - Others

Medium pre-comm indep. - Churchgoers

No pre-comm indep. - Others

No pre-comm indep. - Churchgoers

Russian empire - Others

Russian empire - Churchgoers

Prussian empire - Others

Prussian empire - Churchgoers

Habsburg empire - Others

Habsburg empire - Churchgoers

Interwar Poland - Others

Interwar Poland - Churchgoers

Recovered Territories - Others

Recovered Territories - Churchgoers

-30% -20% -10% 0% 10% 20%PZPR net support

PZPR

-20% -10% 0% 10% 20%Opposition net support

Opposition

Figure 3: Moderators of Church Attendance

The effects of church attendance were significantly weaker in the Recovered Territories

than in the areas that had belonged to the interwar Second Polish Republic. While the size of the

coefficient for the interaction term was very similar in the two models, the overall importance of

church attendance in the Recovered Territories was once again substantively and statistically

weaker with respect to PZPR evaluations.

The weaker political effects of church attendance in the Recovered Territories are not

simply a legacy of Prussian imperial legacies. As illustrated by the predicted effects in Figure 3,

the political impact of church attendance in the Prussian territories was only marginally smaller

than in the Habsburg and Russian territories, so it cannot account for the patterns we found in

model 1 above.

25

By contrast, there is stronger support for the importance of independent statehood as a

moderator of church attendance effects. In Figure 3, we illustrate the magnitude of these effects

for different lengths of pre-WWII independence experience and show that with respect to PZPR

attitudes the effects of church attendance were roughly 4 times larger in areas with very long pre-

communist Polish independence than in areas with no history of pre-WWII Polish statehood.10

With respect to opposition attitudes, Figure 3 suggests that the magnitude of the differences in

the church attendance effects was somewhat smaller, though it was still almost twice as large for

the area with the longest independence experience.

Finally, in the last row of Figure 3, we illustrate the impact of large pre-WWII

concentrations of Germans on the political effectiveness of church attendance. The substantive

effects illustrated in Figure 3 suggests that the weakening effect of massive resettlements in post-

WWII Poland were more pronounced with respect to support for the anti-communist opposition

than for the support/rejection of the communist ruling party. In the next subsection we turn to

tests aiming to verify what is the mechanism through which church attendance operates to boost

or depress anti-communist attitudes in different parts of Poland.

Tests of the proposed mechanisms

To test our first hypothesis---stipulating that the increased effect of church attendance on

dissident attitudes is driven by lower trust levels ---we will focus on the interaction between

church attendance and imperial regions as a predictor of trust towards the Catholic Church. In

model 2, we present the results of an ordered probit regression where the dependent variable is

the extent to which the respondent agrees with the statement “Do you believe that the Catholic

Church serves the interest of society? We believe that answers to this question can be interpreted

10 The former corresponds to Habsburg-Krakow, while the latter effect to the Recovered Territories (and not surprisingly the effects are virtually identical to those in model 1).

26

as expressions of trust in the Catholic Church. All remaining variables are the same as in the

model predicting anti- and pro-communist attitudes. Observing that coefficients on the

interactions between Church Attendance and variables describing historic partitions are similarly

significant as in the first model from Table 2, would lend support to the hypothesis stipulating

that. Our results, shown in model 2 of Table 2 indicate however, that although Church-goers are

more likely to think that the Church serves the interest of society, none of the interactions

between Church attendance and Region show significance. Similarly, there is little difference in

the effect of Church attendance across regions, even though there seems to be a slightly stronger

effect in the Habsburg/Free part (representing Krakow) than elsewhere. Figure 4 below presents

the combined effect of Church Attendance (directly and via the Partitions variable) in all of our 6

regions.

Fig 4: Combined effects of Church attendance on Trust (Church Evaluations):

Habsburg

Habsburg-Russia

Habsburg/Free

Prussia

Prussia-Russia

Recovered Territories

40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%Net evaluations of Church (%favorable-%unfavorable)

Regular church goers Others

Church Evaluations by Region & Church Attendance

27

In order to test our second mechanism, that the anti-communist message operates through the

fusion of nationalism and Catholicism, we present a probit regression where the dependent

variable is selecting the answer “Increase attachment to national traditions” when asked the

question: “What should be done to improve Poland's situation?” As before, all the remaining

variables in the regression remain the same and our expectation is that if the mechanism through

which Church attendance operates is the nationalism of parishioners, then these variables should

predict nationalism just as well as they predicted support for the PZPR. In the results shown in

model 3 of Table 2, we find however that although Church goers are more nationalistic in the

Habsburg/Free and Prussian areas, they are not more nationalistic in the Habsburg region, in

Habsburg-Russia or in Prussia-Russia. The intermediary category are the Recovered Territories.

Hence, again, the pattern is very different than the one predicting support for the PZPR. Figure 5,

below, presents the combined effects—direct and via Partition—of Church attendance on

nationalistic attitudes among respondents.

Fig 5: Combined effects of Church attendance on Attachment to National Traditions

Habsburg

Habsburg-Russia

Habsburg/Free

Prussia

Prussia-Russia

Recovered Territories

10% 20% 30% 40% 50%% supporting stronger national tradition emphasis

Regular church goers Others

National Traditions Support by Region & Church Attendance

28

As the figure above indicates, in the case of several regions, even the combined effect of church

attendance in insignificant in predicting attachment to national traditions.

We also tested the difference in fusing nationalism with Catholicism as a potential explanation

for the different effect of Church attendance on anti-communist attitudes by including data on

bishops, specifically by accounting for where the bishop residing in the wojewodztwo of the

respondent obtained his education. If the bishop obtained his degree in Krakow, Lwow or

Lublin, we classified this bishop as having an education rich in national tradition. If the

mechanism through which church attendance operates is as stipulated in hypothesis 2, the

interaction between the bishops education and region should make the interaction between

Church attendance and region irrelevant. As illustrated in model 4, it does in the case of some

regions, but not all. Specifically, church attendance matters more for bishops with an education

rich in national traditions. Adding the variable along with the interactive term washes away the

difference between the Recovered Territories and the Habsburg/Free region, but the difference

between the Recovered Territories and the Habsburg-Russia region remains.

Finally, we test the third stipulated mechanism about clergy embededness in the

community as a way through which church attendance could interact with historical legacies to

produce dissident attitudes. To do so, we again turn to our data on bishops, using this time their

tenure in office, their education, and their history of incarceration, focusing on Gestapo prisons.

We add interactions between these three bishops variables and the Partitions to the baseline

model. We expect, that if the mechanism stipulated in hypothesis 3 is correct, adding these

variables ought to make the interaction between the Partitions and Church attendance irrelevant.

The results of our ordered probit regression are in model 5 of table 2, while Figure 6 below,

29

again presents the combined direct and indirect effects of Church attendance across the 6

regions:

Figure 6: Combined effects of Church attendance on PZPR support (direct effect and via Partitions) after including entire set of bishops’ variables compared to baseline model:

High Patriotic Education Bishops - OthersHigh Patriotic Education Bishops - Churchgoers

Low Patriotic Education Bishops - OthersLow Patriotic Education Bishops - Churchgoers

Gestapo Prison Bishop - OthersGestapo Prison Bishop - Churchgoers

No Gestapo Prison Bishop - OthersNo Gestapo Prison Bishop - Churchgoers

Long Bishop Tenure - OthersLong Bishop Tenure - Churchgoers

Short Bishop Tenure - OthersShort Bishop Tenure - Churchgoers

Recovered Territories - OthersRecovered Territories - Churchgoers

Prussia-Russia - OthersPrussia-Russia - Churchgoers

Prussia - OthersPrussia - Churchgoers

Habsburg-Free - OthersHabsburg-Free - Churchgoers

Habsburg-Russia - OthersHabsburg-Russia- Churchgoers

Habsburg - OthersHabsburg - Churchgoers

-30%-20%-10% 0% 10% 20%PZPR net support

PZPR

-20% -10% 0% 10% 20%PZPR net support

PZPR (Church Controls)

Figure 6: Accounting for Sub-national Church Characteristics

We see that church attendance matters much more respondents in regions with bishops who were

nationalistically educated and that it matters less for respondents in regions with bishops who

had experiences with Gestapo prisons. The interactions between Church attendance and Bishops

nationalistic experience are now similar to the baseline model, but the church attendance effect

has now become very weak in the Habsburg/Free region.

30

5. Conclusion

This paper analyzes ten public opinion surveys from one of the most interesting stages in

Polish history (1985-89), which spanned the period from just after the end of Martial Law until

the start of shock therapy market reforms under the non-communist government of Tadeusz

Mazowiecki. Given that the survey organization that ran these surveys was set up by the

communist government with the explicit purpose of gathering accurate information about the

political attitudes of the population, we have argued that their results are likely to be valid at least

insofar as they do not represent a propaganda but rather an information-gathering effort.

As described in the introduction, the correlation between Imperial borders that divided Poland

between 1795 and 1918 and current voting behavior is a well established empirical fact. Yet in

order for partitions to influence anti-communist attitudes so they can translate into anti-

communist voting, one should be able to find evidence of these attitudes during the period of

communist rule itself. Supplying this “missing link” in the line of research connecting imperial

legacies to electoral voting behavior is the aim of our paper. To the best of our knowledge, no

one to date has used any surveys conducted during the authoritarian period to research the

mechanism through which Zabory influenced anti-regime attitudes prior to the transition.

Our analysis of these surveys allows us to examine the “missing link” in a relationship that has

been established by scholars between the legacy of Polish partitions and electoral voting

behavior from 1995 to date. We theorize that the missing link ought to manifest itself in anti-

communist and also examine the ways in which not only imperial legacies, but also trajectories

of independence in different Polish regions and Catholic Church attendance may have intervened

in how these legacies influence attitudes towards the authoritarian regime and the opposition in

late communist Poland. We indeed find that Poland’s differential imperial legacies played an

31

important role in shaping the patterns of political support for the communist regime and the

opposition. In line with existing research on post-transition behavior, we find that support for the

communist regime was significantly stronger in the former Prussian partition, as well as in areas

that were resettled by Poles following the Yalta treaty in 1945 compared to areas that

accumulated the most years of Polish independence between 1797 and 1945, such as Krakow.

Our empirical investigations focused on the intervening effect of regular religious practice. We

find that attending church matters differently for developing anticommunist attitudes in different

parts of Poland. It matters considerably less in areas that were resettled after 1945 than in areas

with an established history of “Polishness.” We interpret this finding to mean that not only

partition legacies modify the effect religious practice on pro- and anti-regime views. Critical as

well are the legacies of other historical periods and events in combinations with the partitions.

Specifically, churches set up in the recovered territories among uprooted communities, with risk-

avoiding priests could not serve as centers of disseminating patriotism in the same way that

churches in the traditionally Polish regions, such as Krakow, were.

We then investigate three potential mechanisms through which church attendance could

make parishoners anti-communist depending on where they went to church. These mechanisms

rely on: trust in the Catholic Church, the degree of fusion between nationalism and Catholicism,

and the embeddedness of priests in their communities. We find no evidence of the first

mechanism, moderately weak support for the second, and moderately strong support for the third

posited mechanism We will continue to explore the embededdness/rootedness mechanism by

analyzing data on post-Yalta resettlements and micro-data on the parishes of “Patriotic Priests.”

32

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Appendix: Information about the CBOS Surveys

The Center for Public Opinion Research (CBOS) was created when Poland’s communist

authorities came to the realization that that relying on reports from the secret police alone left

them unprepared for outbreaks of popular dissidence. The Martial Law scenario could have been

avoided altogether had the authorities been adequately informed of popular support for the

Solidarity trade union. Relying exclusively on the reports from Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB), the

state secret police was no longer feasible, because this data had informed the decision to legalize

Solidarity. “Intelligence” provided by SB led the authorities to believe that Solidarity would be a

marginalized movement with no more than a few hundred thousand members. To the

communists’ surprise, Solidarity membership exceeded nine million members in a matter of

months (Holzer 1990, Lopinski et.al. 1990). As it turned out, SB’s estimates were based on an

outdated informer network that failed to keep up with the rapidly growing dissident community.

Critically, the secret police lacked agents in many dissident cells that ended up fueling Solidarity

membership upon legalization. At the same time, in the Polish United Workers Party—Polska

Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR), the official name of the Communist Party in Poland—

membership was dwindling dramatically, as rank and file members surrendered their party IDs.

By late 1981, PZPR’s membership was barely a quarter of Solidarity’s.

At that point, the communists responded in the only way they knew. In order to close the

door on a foreign intervention to demobilize the dissident movement (resembling the Soviet and

Warsaw Pact crackdowns in Hungary in 1956 and in Prague in 1968, respectively), on December

12th, 1981, the Polish communist military commanders introduced Martial Law and arrested over

10,000 members of the Solidarity leadership In the winter of 1981, 18 months after the

legalization of the independent trade union, not only the Polish communists, but also leaders

35

from the Warsaw Pact countries were worried about the future of communism in Poland. The

trade union itself was outlawed alongside smaller independent organizations. A curfew hour was

introduced; all telephone conversations became closely monitored and national borders were

sealed. The military reinstated a six-day working week and placed mass media, public

administration, health services, power stations, coal mines, and key industrial plans as well as the

transportation network under its management (Paczkowski 2008).

The provisions of Martial Law stayed in place until July 22, 1983. Even before the

restrictions of the military regime began to be lifted (which happened gradually throughout

1982), the lesson learned was clear: the regime needed alternative sources of information to SB

reports about the political views of Polish citizens. A set of 17 nationally representative public

opinion surveys between 1985-90, ten of which are analyzed here, is the by-product of this

realization of the communist regime (Kwiatkowski, 2004).

While the political consequences of this recognition are beyond the scope of this paper,11

the byproduct of the regime’s realization is. The polling company CBOS was given a fair amount

of autonomy in running the surveys, which allays potential concerns that the poll design may

have been biased to produce results favorable to the communist regime (Kwiatkowski 2004).

Among other strategies, the managerial positions of CBOS were staffed by sociologists from

Warsaw University’s IFiS, the relatively independent social science department, whose team of

sociologists under the leadership of Stefan Nowak and Wojciech Adamski started conducting

public opinion poll surveys during the 18 month period when Solidarity was a legal trade union.

These surveys provide us with a unique insight into one of the most fascinating episodes of 20th

century political history and more broadly into the temporal dynamics of regime and opposition

11 While the greater insight into patterns of popular support and opposition ultimately did not allow the Polish Communists to avoid the fall of the regime, it arguably contributed to the peaceful negotiated power transfer which compares favorably to the chaotic violence that engulfed Romania in December 1989.

36

support in a country undergoing the transition from a relatively consolidated authoritarianism in

late 1985 to a fledgling democracy by early 1990. (Adamski 1982, Adamski et.

37

38