Almost half of respondents describe their attitude towards the United States as very positive – interestingly, this ratio is over 12% higher than in January this year – is a result of a public opinion polls on Polish foreign policy prepared by the Casimir Pulaski Foundation and the Selectivv company. The full report was unveiled during a press conference held on March 19 at the Foundation’s headquarters in Warsaw.
The goal of the study was to analyse the attitude of Poles to issues pertinent to the Polish foreign policy, international security and diplomatic relations with other states. The respondents were asked what they perceive to be the greatest threat to the security of Poland and Poles at the present, their attitudes towards certain selected states, including Israel, Germany, France, the United States and the Russian Federation, as well as the state of the Polish Armed Forces, as a guarantor of the security of the Republic of Poland. The respondents have also defined their attitude to the historical policy of the current government in Warsaw, in the context of relations with Israel and Ukraine. The poll has also asked for the Polish public’s opinion as to what Poland’s actions should be, if sanctions were to be imposed on Poland by the European Union, for violating of the rule of law.
In late March, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs will present the annual “Information of the Minister of Foreign Affairs on Polish foreign policy tasks”, which is commonly referred to as the Minister’s expose. The Casimir Pulaski Foundation experts are currently preparing a third report on Poland’s foreign and security policy. In 2018, Poland is celebrating a centennial anniversary of its independence on the one hand but on the other, it is faced with the most consequential challenges to it’s security since the fall of communism and the transformation of the political system. Factors such as the growing assertiveness of the Russian Federation, the risk of disintegration of the European Union or the wave of populism that is now sweeping across the Western societies. Therefore, for the purposes of this year’s report, we decided to turn the optics and provide the ordinary Polish citizen with an ability to voice his or hers opinion, by conducting a public opinion poll on the Polish foreign policy. We asked Poles to assess the government’s foreign policy and the country’s security environment – says Tomasz Smura, Head of the Research Office at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation.
The survey was conducted on a sample of 50,000 individuals living in Poland. The report was prepared by the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in cooperation with the Selectivv Mobile House research company, which specializes in obtaining, analyzing and profiling mobile device users data. The survey was conducted twice (in January and March of 2018), in order to determine how stable is the Polish public’s perception of the foreign policy on the one hand, and to try and identify the dominant trends on the other. The results of the survey have been enhanced with the DMP Selectivv data warehouse information, which is a big data collection gathered from smart device users. The advantage of this method when compared with traditional surveys is a significant reduction of time needed, and an incomparably higher statistical sample – said a Selectivv Mobile House representative.