Listed below are two maps of Poland. The map on the left exhibits the partitioned Poland of 1815–1918 (from Classes from the Partitions of Poland). The map on the fitting is Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza’s interactive map of this week’s 2025 Polish Election.
It has lengthy been a convention, after each Polish election, for observers to notice that present voting patterns within the nation nonetheless appear to comply with the nation’s previous imperial borders. Again in 2013, Irena Grosfeld and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya wrote that the spatial sample of the 2007 Polish election was “decided, to a big extent, by the Partitions of Poland (1772–1918).” In The Previous within the Polish Current, the 2 professors argue that the very completely different financial and social insurance policies pursued by Russia, Prussia, and Austria throughout their management of Polish territories for over a century have left a persistent legacy. This legacy as soon as once more seems to have been evident on this week’s Polish election.
In Do Poland’s Nineteenth-century partitions nonetheless affect elections in the present day?, Katarzyna Skiba takes a better have a look at this obvious connection between trendy Polish political opinions and “the continuing legacies of empire.” Her examination of Polish politics consists of a number of critiques of what some take into account an excessively simplistic comparability.
By way of: Datawrapper’s Knowledge Viz Dispatch
