I don’t know how many of you reading this have ever fielded your own survey (or paid for someone else to field a survey you’ve designed), but one frustrating part of this enterprise is that you spend hours and hours trying to come up with great questions for your survey, only to revisit the data years later and realize that 90% of the questions you spent all that time thinking about have never made it anywhere near one of your published papers. Fortunately, we now have blogs…
With that in mind, here’s the result of a survey question we asked in Poland in 2006 at the height of the “Kaczynski era”, when Lech Kaczynski was president of Poland and his twin bother Jaroslaw was the Prime Minister. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time twins have ever held the two highest executive offices in the land simultaneously anywhere. So what did the Polish people think about this situation at the time?
Interestingly, when Lech Kaczynski was elected President of Poland in 2005, it was (a) immediately following the parliamentary elections, which had been won by the party his brother headed and (b) in the second round of of a two-round majoritarian system, which meant that a majority of voters had to vote for him in the second round for him to be elected (and indeed he had received “54% of the vote”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_presidential_election,_2005). Following the partliamentary elections brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski had announced that he, personally, would not become prime minister, in part to reduce apprehension over the prospect of twins as president and prime minister. However, J. Kaczynski “installed himself as prime minister”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaros%C5%82aw_Kaczy%C5%84ski in July of 2006, and our survey was taken two months later. An interesting research question would be to try to disentangle whether the answer to this question simply reflected disenchantment with the Kaczynski’s and their “Law and Justice”:http://www.pis.org.pl/main.php political party – they would go on to be soundly defeated in the “2007 parliamentary elections”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_parliamentary_election,_2007 – and how much hostility towards twins holding the two highest offices in the land was (is) exogenous to the performance of the Kaczynskis and PiS and therefore might have actually instead been a partial contributing factor to PiS’s defeat in 2007.