by Kutup Aytekin
Poland’s post-socialist economic transformation has long been celebrated as a free-market success story. In Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland’s Illiberal Revolution, Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley complicate this narrative by tracing how the uneven distribution of Poland’s prosperity created the opening for Law and Justice (PiS) to build a credible redistributive program: one that proved both electorally decisive and socially transformative. Kutup Aytekin’s review highlights how the book places economic policymaking at the center of PiS’s trajectory: its welfare agenda helped the party consolidate power, yet ultimately the liberal opposition’s adoption of that same redistributive consensus contributed to PiS’s downfall.
Looking at Poland’s post-Soviet transition and its subsequent economic success, many mainstream accounts hailed the Polish case as a triumph for free market capitalism. According to these accounts, Poland adopted Western institutions as a foundation for economic development. It introduced successful market-oriented reforms very early on, adopted an independent monetary policy, and privatized several state-owned enterprises in a “broadly efficient and transparent way.” While early critics of Poland’s transition economy, such as Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, pointed out that rapid neoliberal reforms resulted in adverse economic and social impacts, these remarks were brushed off. When Klein’s arguments were brought up to Jeffrey Sachs, a key architect of Poland’s transition to a market economy, he claimed, “Poland ended up the most successful recovery, with robust democratic institutions, and I couldn’t be more thrilled”. It is possible to observe traces of such triumphalism even today: In a recent article, The Economist cited Poland as an example of “how much a country can achieve by European integration and good economic policy.”
In their book “Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland’s Illiberal Revolution,” Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley offer a more nuanced story than the traditional narrative. As indicated in the title, the authors explain why Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) won the support of the Polish people, how PiS governed the country after assuming power, and the reasons behind its downfall. While explaining the dynamics behind PiS’s rise, Bill and Stanley thoroughly depict the people’s increasing disillusionment with the country’s “economic miracle.” As people noticed the rift between rising prosperity on the one side and lower wage growth and employment opportunities on the other, they realized the benefits of the economic boom were unevenly distributed (34). Capitalizing on this trend, PiS situated itself as the actor who can truly represent the concerns of “left-behind” socio-demographic constituencies (54). While the distributional questions were largely depoliticized under previous administrations, PiS successfully re-politicized them and formulated a credible redistributive economic policy program that appealed to many Poles. Thus, perhaps the most important analytical contribution of the book is deepening existing narratives of Poland’s political-economic system.
Having covered Poland’s transition and the enablers of PiS’s rise, Bill and Stanley focus on the period between 2015 and 2023, in which PiS governed Poland. They masterfully depict how PiS gradually took over Poland’s liberal democratic institutions on multiple fronts. The party took over Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal by nullifying the appointment of previously-appointed members, modifying the Tribunal’s structure, and appointing its own judges (84). Moreover, Poland’s parliamentarianism deteriorated under PiS’s executive aggrandizement, as the party stifled the opposition’s scrutiny of important bills (91-93). Similarly, PiS hijacked Poland’s public media outlets, making them the government’s propaganda mouthpieces (95-96). While covering this entire process, Bill and Stanley take a further step and discuss how such undertakings received little backlash from the voters. Despite all these attacks and upheavals, PiS actually increased its support in the 2019 elections. The authors offer the imperfect functioning of various institutions in the post-socialist period and the popularity of PiS’s social welfare policies as potential reasons (74). These findings raise questions regarding the success of Poland’s liberal-democratic institutions in embedding the interests of large social groups (working class, poor and middle-income families, rural populations, etc.) into the system. Had these institutions been better at creating a truly inclusive system that left nobody behind, PiS would surely have had more difficulties in hijacking such institutions.
The authors then cover PiS’s economics. Following up on their election promises, PiS implemented a redistributionist economic policy with an emphasis on social welfare. Such a policy framework was radically different than the overarching neoliberal consensus in Polish economic policymaking. Among PiS’s social welfare policies, the most prominent one was Family 500+ (Rodzina 500+), a universal policy which granted families 500 złoty for the second and every further child. While PiS’s ideological adversaries argued that the program is fiscally unrealizable, Family 500+ proved to be a great success and has proven massively popular (120), especially among families raising several children (who benefited the most from the program).
Furthermore, PiS complemented Family 500+ with various other initiatives, such as reversing the earlier hike of retirement age by the previous government, cash transfers, free medicine for the seniors over the age of seventy-five, income tax exemption for workers under twenty-six, and a series of minimum wage increases. Having implemented these policies, the party presented itself as a promoter of the “Polish model of welfare state”(122). Consequently, these initiatives dramatically reduced social inequalities and extreme child poverty (126). The success of PiS in responding to previously unaddressed social demands proved politically beneficial. Bill and Stanley highlight that the 500+ program alone boosted PiS’s vote share by 2 percentage points, enabling the party to retain its majority (128-130). By underlining this novelty within PiS’s economic vision, Bill and Stanley’s account reveals the tension between PiS’s right-wing stance on socio-cultural questions and its diverging left-wing stance in economic policymaking. Thus, while many accounts that classify PiS as a right-wing populist party are correct, they nevertheless remain incomplete.
Moreover, Bill and Stanley also compare the Polish and Hungarian cases, pointing out that PiS “directly emulated the success of Orban’s Hungarian model,” with the exception that PiS’s economic agenda was more redistributive. The authors also underline how PiS and Orban’s Fidesz “leaned much further to the left” compared to other radical-right parties across Europe (137). Then, they connect the redistributive policies of both parties with the victories of Boris Johnson in 2019 and Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024. According to their account, the Conservatives under Johnson attracted traditional Labour voters with “left-wing views on economic questions” by promising a redistributionist public investment policy of leveling up certain regions (139). They also make a similar case for Trump, arguing that Trump “provides evidence of a shift to the left on economic policy in comparison with previous positions of the Republican Party” (140).
While this is an excellent way to link discourses around Poland to the wider context, I remain skeptical in placing PiS and Fidesz’s economic policymaking into a traditional left-right spectrum. While redistribution is a crucial part of any left-wing economic vision, PiS and Fidesz’s redistribution agenda was largely conditioned by their right-wing socio-cultural position. As a result, their redistributive policies unfolded in a selective manner that prioritized “traditional families” while embracing an exclusionary rhetoric against “undeserving outsiders.” Likewise, it is difficult to explain Johnson and Trump’s positions with the left-right axis that the authors employ. Rather than relatively pivoting towards the left, it is more probable that both leaders tried to appeal to the losers of neoliberal transformation. Their subsequent policy choices after assuming power, such as Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and Johnson’s decision to remove £20 uplift to Universal Credit, also do not signal such a pivot.
Ultimately, Bill and Stanley offer a multi-dimensional scrutiny of PiS’s rule in Poland. However, as the book’s title suggests, the authors’ narrative is also about the fall of PiS. In deliberating on this question, they offer a rich list of reasons behind PiS’s downfall that considers the electoral system, the opposition, PiS’s missteps, PiS’s inability to find coalition partners, and demographic change (215-227). However, one crucial reason that excellently fits into their overarching argument is the opposition’s change of heart regarding economic policymaking. The popularity of PiS’s redistribution agenda had forced the liberal opposition parties to adopt this program (227). This meant a subsequent depoliticization of redistribution, as both contenders adopted similar positions. At this point, the authors draw a full circle and enable us to trace how the politicization of distributional questions has evolved. While PiS came into power by politicizing redistribution, the liberal opposition in 2023 depoliticized it by embracing redistribution. However, this was not a mere return to status quo ante, since the entire discourse on redistribution in Poland has become radically different from the previous neoliberal framework.
In the eyes of many liberals, the opposition’s electoral success was a victory of the rule of law against authoritarian populism. Slightly diverging from this narrative, Bill and Stanley offer a more nuanced synthesis. After highlighting the difficulties of dismantling the legacy of illiberalism with liberalism, the authors point out that the new government had to choose between acting quickly and effectively, or acting legally. Tusk’s government chose the first option (233). Just like PiS, Tusk’s government placed its allies and representatives in key roles and took over important institutions (230). Similarly, the government re-purged and re-captured public media outlets by using legal loopholes (231). In a world where authoritarianism continues to inflict considerable damage on democratic institutions, Bill and Stanley’s book raises important questions for political movements that claim to be pro-democratic. These movements often position themselves on a moral high ground against the authoritarian incumbent that they seek to dethrone. However, once they succeed in contesting the incumbent, they undermine the very ground they stand on with antidemocratic undertakings that create further grievances and divisions within the society. By shedding light on such an example, the book reveals the traps that pro-democratic governments fall into in undoing the previous illiberal damage to democratic governance.
Overall, Bill and Stanley put together a detailed portrayal of an illiberal government that ruled Poland for eight years. The book’s biggest strength is its ability to go beyond the mainstream portrayals of Poland and offer a more compelling account that explains the rise and fall of PiS. While the book is mostly about Polish politics, the authors successfully invoke other countries as comparative studies when necessary. Therefore, the book appropriately connects its argument to important broader political discussions as well. As Poland prepares itself for its next parliamentary elections in 2027 within a changing global order, the question now is whether PiS’s “illiberal revolution” will make a comeback.
Bill, Stanley, and Ben Stanley. 2025. Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland’s Illiberal Revolution. Stanford University Press.
