Między zaangażowaniem, przystosowaniem i sprzeciwem : postawy mieszkańców województwa białostockiego wobec wyborów powszechnych w latach 1957-1969

This dissertation describes the attitude of the inhabitants of Białostockie Province to elections to the parliamentary and local elections held in the times of relative stabilization of power in Poland, which came after the political breakthrough of 1956 and lasted almost until the end of the 1960s. An inspiration for pursuing this topic was the thesis of an English political scientist – David Beetham, who claims that in pseudo-democratic single-party systems, general elections were organized with such a limited political competition and such massive intimidation that they were “nothing but a formal confirmation of political preferences of the ruling elite”. This thesis is concurrent with the stereotypical belief that nearly 100% voter turnout in the elections conducted in the Polish People’s Republic was always the result of fraud while in fact the majority of the society opposed the government.