Populism and security policy-making: The case of Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) government, 2015–23

Abstract The growing literature on populism and international security portrays populist governments as particularly prone to confrontational security politics. Yet whether populist rhetoric translates into substantive changes in security policy remains contested. We argue that populist governments exert uneven influence across different dimensions of security policy-making, with greater capacity to reshape the ideational and institutional dimensions than the geopolitical, operational, and material ones. To explain this variation, we develop a five-dimensional framework of security policy-making and apply it to Poland under the Law and Justice (PiS) government (2015–23). Drawing on official documents, secondary sources, and twenty-eight anonymised interviews with policymakers and security experts, we examine how populist discourse translated into policy change. We find that PiS successfully politicised security narratives, broadened threat perceptions, and intensified the domestic use of security discourse, while largely maintaining continuity in Poland’s strategic orientation. Major shifts in defence policy were driven primarily by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine rather than by PiS’s populist agenda. The Polish case demonstrates that the effects of populism vary systematically across different dimensions of security policy-making and are conditioned by geopolitical constraints, institutional resilience, alliance commitments, and external shocks. The article contributes to debates on populism and international security by specifying the conditions under which populist governments are – and are not – able to produce lasting security policy change.