http://www.yale.edu/ycias/ocvprogram/wittenberg.pdf
Mass Politics in Interwar Poland
Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg
November 9, 2004
A third question concerns the communist parties. In interwar Poland, the communist party was illegal. It nonetheless ran under a number of names that were easy for voters to identity, usually some variation of "workers and peasants" in its name. Although the communist party received only 1.5 percent of the vote in the 1922 election, in 1928 it received 2.5 percent of the vote. However, a large number of regional and local communist, ethno-communist, and pro-Soviet parties mushroomed in time for the 1928 election and when taken together they received 8 percent of the vote, a total that most historians argue would probably have reached closer to 10 percent had a large number of ballots not been invalidated in the Eastern Territories.
The remarkable thing about this FIgure is how very different the Jewish and Catholic settlements are from the Orthodox and Uniate ones. Communist support is highest in settlements where there are no Jews (or Catholics) and relatively low in settlements where there are high numbers of Jews. This is even stronger evidence that the Jews were not supporting the communists at the mass level. With the exception of a handful of probably mining settlements(on the far right of the Catholic panel, with high communist support), a similar relationship holds for the Catholics. This is in stark contrast with the Orthodox and Uniate panels, where the communists hardly ever seem to get more votes than the
number of minorities in a settlement.
In the South, the Uniate were mainly Ukrainian. In the East, most of the Orthodox were Ukrainian................................Communists..Left..Center..Government.. Minority Right
South ........Catholic.... .....-...............32....... -............ 42.............. -......... 23
...................Uniate..........12.............. -......... -............ 21............. 67........ -
...................Jews............. -................ -........ -............ 30............. 69........ -
East and.... Catholic........ 2............. 58........ -............ 16............... 2........ 21
Central...... Orthodox..... 37.............. -......... -............. 43............. 19........ -
..................Jews............. 2............... -......... - .............27............. 64......... 6
Table 1: Religious Bases of Mass Political Behavior, 1928. Ecological inference
estimates.N = 2000 for the South and N = 1400 for the East and Central.
