On 10th Octo­ber 2019 the high-lev­el expert sem­i­nar “How to pro­mote  open soci­ety val­ues in a polit­i­cal­ly polar­ized soci­ety” took place at the con­fer­ence room of the Insti­tute of Pub­lic Affairs in Warsaw.

The empha­sis of the event was the pre­sen­ta­tion of the key com­par­a­tive and Pol­ish find­ings from the research project Voic­es on val­ues: How Euro­pean publics and pol­i­cy actors val­ue an open soci­ety. The project was car­ried out in six EU coun­tries by the Open Soci­ety Euro­pean Pol­i­cy Insti­tute and the Ger­man think-tank d|part with local part­ners (includ­ing IPA in Poland). The results were pre­sent­ed by Dr Jan Eich­horn, Research Direc­tor at d|part, and Fil­ip Pazder­s­ki, senior ana­lyst at IPA. 

Dr Heather Grabbe and Dr Jacek Kuchar­czyk com­ment­ed on the pre­sen­ta­tions and invit­ed par­tic­i­pants to dis­cuss sev­er­al impor­tant prac­ti­cal ques­tions: How can we strength­en the attach­ment to open soci­ety val­ues, while reduc­ing people’s fears? What nar­ra­tives can opin­ion lead­ers and deci­sion mak­ers use to sup­port open soci­ety val­ues effec­tive­ly, with­out expos­ing them­selves to easy attacks from author­i­tar­i­an pop­ulists? What strate­gies of pro­mot­ing such val­ues and dimin­ish­ing sup­port for closed soci­ety val­ues have been used in oth­er coun­tries and what ini­tia­tives can we expect from the new Euro­pean institutions?