Institutional Capacity of Ukrainian Governments: Issues of Efficiency and Legitimacy

Abstract

The article analyzes the effectiveness and legitimacy (which are interrelated) of Ukrainian governments in 2014–2024 and identifies the regulatory and legal traps that create an acute deficit of their institutional capacity. The author emphasizes that the crises of institutional capacity of governments in modern consolidated democracies and in Ukraine, which is still being formed as a democracy, have different origins. The basic determinant of the "democratic backslide" of liberal democracies is the departure of governments from egalitarian practices. In Ukraine, the deficiencies in the capacity of governments are due to the "embedding" of regulatory and legal "traps" in the Constitution of Ukraine of 1996, which have been destroying the system of power distribution inherent in democratic political regimes for 30 years, making it difficult for governments and parliaments to demonstrate their own subjectivity and creating conditions for influential informal institutions (e. g., oligarchs) to participate in politics. The researcher argues that the regulatory and legal traps that disable Ukrainian governments and lead to the formation of a government product of mediocre quality (for example, the reforms of 2014–2021) are the dual management structure of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine (both the Prime Minister and the President have grounds for this). Lack of effective and balanced relations between the government and the parliament, which regulates the practice of semi-accepted governments, and a mechanism for resolving government crises. The article argues that the process of Ukraine’s accession to the EU gives a new impetus to the dismantling of post-Soviet institutionalism that began in 2014. This process becomes especially dramatic in the first year of full-scale war (from 2022 onwards), when the beginning of the dismantling of post-Soviet institutions overlapped with the need to maintain the country’s governability during the war. The author hopes that the need to "bring" Ukrainian institutions and their inherent practices to the EU level gives reasonable expectations for the formation of a legal framework in our country that will modernize Ukrainian institutions (and governments, above all). It is important, according to the researcher, to propose an approach to reform that would be a synthesis of both updating the legal framework governing the government and introducing instrumental changes that would form a new institutional culture.