Commissioned Book Review: Wojciech Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown (Oxford Comparative Constitutionalism)
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920931440 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Author | Etienne Hanelt |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(4) NP11 –NP12
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
931440PSW0010.1177/1478929920931440Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
research-article2020
Commissioned Book Review
Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown
(Oxford Comparative Constitutionalism) by
Wojciech Sadurski. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2019. 304pp., £29.95, ISBN 9780198840503.
In recent years, a new genre of books has
emerged that predicts, observes and attempts to
explain the slow end of democracy. Even
though Sadurski’s monograph on Poland is
more modest in its goal to provide ‘an account
of what happened, why it happened, and how it
happened’ (p. vi), it is a case study belonging to
that category. Unlike trade books such as
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s (2019) How
Democracies Die, the book reviewed is an aca-
demic monograph published in a constitutional
law series. Rather unusual for the genre, the
book is not a dispassionate account. The author
sets the tone early: ‘I believe that this book is
accurate, neutral it is not’ (p. vii).
Sadurski starts with a discussion of the
appropriate terminology to frame the analysis
of events in Poland and arrives at the term ‘anti-
constitutional populist backsliding’. The sec-
ond chapter situates the recent events in its
historical context, focussing on the democrati-
zation period since 1989. The bulk of the book,
namely four chapters, is dedicated to a thick
description of the rule of law backsliding in
Poland. Sadurski describes the attack on the
Constitutional Tribunal (chapter 3); the wider
judiciary (chapter 4); the parliamentary opposi-
tion, civil service, media, electoral institutions,
civil society (chapter 5); and individual rights
(chapter 6). Chapter 8, meanwhile, analyses the
actions taken by European institutions to inter-
vene in and mitigate the Polish developments.
The parliamentary election in the autumn
of 2015 brought the Law and Justice Party
(PiS) to power. Almost immediately, a row
over five contested appointments to Poland’s
Constitutional Tribunal turned into a full-
flung assault on the country’s top court. The
EU Commission applied its new rule of law
framework to address ‘threats to the rule of
law which are of a systemic nature’ for the
first time in January 2016. Three rule of law
recommendations later, in December 2017,
the Commission activated proceedings
according to the preventive mechanism of
Article 7(1) TEU with a proposal to find ‘a
clear risk of a serious breach [. . .] of the rule
of law’, again a first in the Union’s history.
Sadurski chronicles the breakdown of
Poland’s constitutional order that led to these
EU interventions in detail and carefully
describes the cumulative effects of the meas-
ures and their interaction. While the detailed
description is the book’s core contribution,
occasionally, the clarity of the argument gets
lost in the amount of information.
The remaining two chapters engage most
deeply with political science literature. In
chapter 7, Sadurski attempts to answer three
related questions: how PiS came to power, why
it retains the support of a sizable plurality of
the electorate and why it followed a backslid-
ing agenda. The answers to these three
questions, unfortunately, are not clearly distin-
guished analytically. The author attempts a
nuanced and multi-faceted explanation, which
centres on the notion of the ‘paranoid style’
of Polish politics. This is epitomized
by the conspiracy theory surrounding the
Smolensk plane crash in which Jarosław
Kaczyński’s twin brother, then-President Lech
Kaczyński, died. Sadurski explains PiS’s vic-
tory in the 2015 election with the party’s acti-
vation and utilization of xenophobic and
anti-establishment sentiments as well as ‘illib-
eral impatience’ with checks and balances.
How the latter helped bring PiS to power
remains unclear. It cannot explain the backslid-
ing either, as it amounts to the tautological
insight that those with illiberal attitudes
towards constraints on their power try to
remove checks and balances. Furthermore, the
mechanism that translates the party chairman’s
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