State Institutions, Political Context and Parliamentary Election Legislation in Ukraine, 2000–2006

Abstract

In the period since independence, Ukrainian electoral laws and constitutional provisions have been amended on several occasions, sometimes involving reversals of positions by individual politicians and political parties. A number of approaches have been employed in order to explain such changes in political systems. In the Ukrainian case, where electoral reform took place in a context of broader institutional design, the shifts in behaviour by both pro-government and opposition politicians seem to have been prompted by short-term calculations of self-interest in a fluid political context dominated by the debate over constitutional reform.