Negotiating experience gave Polish party cadres portable skills ahead of 1989.

Evidence

Although they never fully opened up the political space in Poland, and the state-society conflict from 1981 continued to fester, these efforts were an attempt to justify party policies and to make them more palatable. As a result, the Polish communist party mid-level membership entered 1989 with a set of portable skills gained in their years of negotiating with the opposition and their cyclical reform efforts. Its past, in turn, was a record both of the conflict between party and society, but also of administrative reforms and negotiations. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 287

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s comparative question about why some communist successor parties survived 1989 better than others — skills and legacy as survival resources. — connects to: Policy-reform experience and prior opposition negotiations gave elites portable skills later rewarded in democracy. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 368

Broader Connections

• Policy-reform experience and prior opposition negotiations gave elites portable skills later rewarded in democracy. #corroborates (0.92) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 368