Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg

Mass Politics in Interwar Poland

November 18, 2005

Abstract

The political behavior and loyalties of interwar Poland's minorities remain controversial issues. Among nationalist and even mainstream Polish historians, it is often taken as an article of faith that Poland's large minority population supported Marshal Pilsudski's coup in 1926 and then provided the domestic backbone of support for the Soviet occupations of 1939 and 1945. In this working paper we assess a unique data set of electoral and matching census data for two elections in interwar Poland in order to make an initial judgment of just how Poland's minorities actually voted.