Polskie Archiwum Danych Społecznych

Social Sciences

EAST PaC Poland 1985 - 2015 Data Changes
East European Parliamentarian and Candidate data (EAST PaC) for Poland has undergone two substantive revisions. First, it has been updated with the 2015 national elections for Sejm and Senat. The time span for the data was 1985 - 2011, and is now 1985 - 2015. For the 2015 elections only, we also included an education variable for each candidate for which these data are available. Poland’s Electoral Commision, the PKW, did not provide data on education of candidates to Sejm and Senate. During the data collection and cleaning, the education has been successfully retrieved in case of 71.4% of Sejm candidates and 84.9% Senate candidates. There were four main sources of data on education.

(1) In some local elections, the PKW listed the education of candidates (most recently in 2006), which allowed us to retrieve data on education in cases where the 2015 candidate had previously participated in those elections;
(2) Before the parliamentary elections the media website parlamentarny.pl published education data for many, but not all, candidates;
(3) Detailed educational data on candidates were also available on official websites of political parties.
(4) Some candidates have set up their own websites in which they provide education data. We estimated that one third of education information came from the website "parlamentarny.pl", one third from the official websites of political parties, while the rest from the PKW information on local elections or from candidates' own websites.

We conducted a similar search for age - year of birth - of candidates because the age of candidates was not available on the official website of PKW. Second, we have revised the name of two class categories that had “intelligentsia” in the name. We did this for the entire data span for which class is available, i.e. 1989 - 2015 (class is not available for 1985). The reason why is because the term “intelligentsia,” while commonplace in Central and Eastern Europe, may seem arcane to scholars outside of the region. We needed a new category name. For the name change, our reference is John H. Goldthorpe and Robert Erikson’s book The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industria l Societies. The Class I in their schema is named "Higher-grade professionals, administrators, and officials; managers in large industrial establishments; large proprietors". This is, essentially, our “non-technical intelligentsia.” We shorten Goldthorpe and Erickson’s Class I to: "Senior officials, higher- grade professionals, and managers.” We changed the "intelligentsia, non-technical" to this shortened term. We also changed "technical intelligentsia, engineers" to "Engineers and technical specialists." The value labels for variables corresponding to social class were changed. Now the list of the value labels is the same for all elections (1989-2015) for which the data on social class were available:

'1' Senior officials, higher-grade professionals, and managers
'2' Engineers and technical specialists
'3' Middle and low-level nonmanual workers
'4' Sales and service workers
'5' Manual workers
'6' Farmers
'7' Small business owners, self-employed
'8' Not working, without occupation
'9' MISSING