Do Entrepreneurial Parties Make any Difference for Polish Politics? The Case of the Palikot Movement and Kukiz’15

Economic crisis together with the overall crisis of liberal democracy have caused social discontent and disappointment with existing mainstream parties, which have been blamed for not being able to cope with emerging problems. At the same time new parties, which have presented themselves as an alternative, have appeared and entered parliaments. Some of them can be regarded as entrepreneurial ones. In the case of Poland this is the Palikot Movement, which managed to overcome the electoral threshold in 2011, and Kukiz’15, which did the same four years later. Both organizations have criticized the mainstream parties (especially limiting competition to PO and PiS) and political elites and have also proposed some alternatives. The aim of the paper is to address the questions of what the “new quality” proposed within the programmes of these entities is and of whether these parties really practise what they have preached, particularly whether they use innovations related to alternative forms of democracy in their own structures and after entering parliament try to put their postulates on the state agenda.