This article aims to analyse, and point to the reasons of, the low participation of women in the public sphere. in particular, it focuses on the image of women’s involvement created in Poland and other EU-member-states in the recent campaign preceding the 2004 Elec- tions to the European Parliament.
The empirical material used in the study comes from the international Research Project “Gender and European Elections”, co-ordinated by Karen Ross (Coventry University, UK) and focusing on the role of women in EP-Election Campaign in ‘old’ and ‘new’ EU- member-states. The detailed examination of Polish daily newspapers: the liberal ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ and the communist ‘Trybuna’ (constituting the Polish part of the said project) is in the main focus of the analysis. The latter is further supplemented with, and compared to, results from other countries such as Lithuania, Czech Republic and France.
As it appears from the analysis of the Polish case, the very limited interest in the EP elections among Polish voters (evading in the, eventually, very low EP-electoral turnout in Poland) stems from the fact that Poles still have a very limited knowledge about the his- tory and functioning of the EU in general, and of the European Parliament in particular. accordingly, the image of the European Parliament which appears from the study sees the EP as a ‘distant’ and ‘supranational’ body which bears little influence on the life of ‘ordi- nary’, Polish citizens. Therefore, prior to the analyses described above, my study provides an extensive introduction highlighting the institutional and political ontology of the EP, while it also focuses on the earlier studies analysing Polish attitudes towards the European Parliament.