Figure 46. Index of liberal democracy, 2001-2022. 1.00 0.75 0.50 0.25 0.00 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 There has been a clear decline in the quality of liberal democracy during the period 2015-2022. In substantial part, this reflects PiS’s assault on the rule of law and judicial independence and its bypassing of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary scrutiny in the passage of legislation. A significant component of the liberal democracy index – and of V-Dem’s conceptual understanding of democracy more generally – is electoral democracy, which refers to the fundamental principle of a genuinely competitive struggle for the popular vote. Since 2015, there has been a strong deterioration from an imperfect but essentially polyarchic democracy to one beset by significant flaws, and this is reflected in the decline in the liberal democracy index. In their preliminary report following the 2023 election, Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights(ODIHR) observers noted that PiS enjoyed a“clear advantage through its undue influence over the use of state resources and the public media”. 282 While elections remain free in the sense that a variety of parties are able to compete without hindrance, the ability of PiS to use the communication resources of state-owned enterprises and their total dominance over public broadcaster TVP – since 2016, essentially an instrument of government propaganda – means that elections cannot be described as fair. The drivers of the decline in the overall quality of democracy can be identified by examining more specific measures. Figure 47 plots trends on a variety of relevant variables. Firstly, the significant rise in political polarisation over the last 15 years is both cause and effect of radicalisation. With the increasingly emotional and personalised enmity between PiS and PO driving the underlying dynamic of the party system since 2005, and with a divide opening up between PiS and the self-styled“democratic opposition” during PiS’s time in power, this polarisation has served to justify aggressive and zero-sum political actions and – with rare exceptions, such as the Polish response to the full Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – has prevented de-escalation to a more cooperative and consensus-based mode of governance. The transformation of the mainstream right and its impact on(social) democracy 117