Poland for many decades was carved up between the Tsarist Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Prussian Empire. How have the very different political and social cultures of those three areas affected Polish politics today?
Here is an analysis that purports to show that current political attitudes among Poland's people have been influenced significantly by previous managements:
Prussia, which was more developed economically, industrialised its Polish part more than Russia and Austria did. The Habsburgs gave substantial administrative and cultural autonomy to their Polish territories: Catholics practised freely, Polish-language schools were common, and Poles were allowed to participate in local administration. Russia stood out in terms of its severe oppression of the Catholic church. Prussia and Russia applied nation-building policies to their Polish territories by forbidding Polish schools.
As these drastically differing economic and social policies were applied for over a century in areas that belonged initially to the same country, with a common ethnic mix, culture, and formal institutions, the partition of Poland could be considered a giant historical experiment...
... empires do have a significant causal effect. First, the once-Russian part of Poland today votes significantly more for post-communist parties and significantly less for post-Solidarity parties compared to the Prussian and Austrian areas; second, voters on the Russian side are also significantly less liberal in their political preferences compared to those on the Austrian side
And so on. To judge by the diagrams and graphs, some of the correlations are indeed striking or at least look so.
One important historical influence is not covered in this analysis, namely the more or less forced migration into what is now Poland of hundreds of thousands of people after WW2 when Poland lost territory in the East but gained it in the West. Such people and their now rootless communities tended (I gather) to end up in more neglected parts of the countryside, so perhaps not surprisingly came to favour a more favourable view of 'social' programmes and state support and support political parties purporting to offer this. The study tries to avoid this complicating fact by looking at areas of Poland where the population was 'relatively stable throughout history'. Hmm.
Plus the study cited looks at the 2007 election results in Poland where the results favoured different 'centre right' or at least anti-left parties, PO and PiS. How to account for the 2001 elections where the centre-left SLD won strongly across the country? What would a similar breakdown of the results by geography show then?
More generally would we expect cultural differences between places to echo down the ages? Yes. Why not?
Take Serbia. Northern Serbia has inherited the advantage of the boring and thorough property title regime of the Austro-Hungarian empire, whereas much of Serbia south of Begrade had a very different Ottoman tradition to land ownership documentation. These diverging approaches to proving who owns what must affect all sorts of ways people behave and their attitudes to investment and continuity, even without them knowing it.
Conclusion?
The past influences the present. Some places are more isolated and so (perhaps) more conservative in the sense of being slower to change, as less in fact changes there. But it's not easy to prove exactly where and how these effects work. No surprise there.
