Strażnik demokracji czy relikt przeszłości? Dyskusje nad zasadnością stosowania ciszy wyborczej

The article focuses on the issue of election silence, the range of its applicability and significance for the Polish democratic system. It describes in detail the legal perspective of the phenomenon at the same time illustrating its actual impact on the functioning of party competition and electoral decision-making process. The primary goal of this paper is to present the results of empirical studies on the importance of pre-election polls for the development of the actual support of voters. Empirical verification has been applied to a thesis which assumes that the publication of opinion polls in support of candidates or political parties during election campaigns should be forbidden longer than just during election silence. The results were also correlated with the declared political preferences of the respondents, which allowed the author a more detailed analysis of the revealed regularities.