Abstract
This article describes the results of a regional-level study of Ukrainian political parties’ interactions. The study sought to identify the congruence or incongruence of the party affiliationof the regional executives and the heads of regional assemblies across Ukraine when Ukraine’s democratic performance rose and fell. The study found that when democratic performance rose, so did regional-level, party-affiliation incongruence, with the greatest ideological incongruence occurring in regions with special institutional arrangements, such as Kyiv and Sevastopol. WhenUkraine’s democratic performance fell, the number of ideologically congruent regions rose. These shifts occurred because a decline in democratic performance leaves little institutional room for statewide opposition, and the main competitors of the ruling party in regional bodies of power are non-statewide parties and blocs. Thus, this article argues that political cleavages in a regionally diverse post-communist state do not automatically mirror the statewide party competition.
Highlights
Party politics in Ukraine has been a popular subject of academic investigation
After the 2004 constitutional reform fully came into force in 2006, regional executives were appointed and dismissed by the president with the consent of the prime minister
This study has captured a nuanced picture of parties competition at the regional level in Ukraine from 2005 through 2012
Summary
Party politics in Ukraine has been a popular subject of academic investigation. the regional dimension of party politics has been largely absent from national and international scholarship. Academics have drawn conclusions about Ukraine’s party system exclusively from the statewide (national) point of view; that is, on the parties’ interactions at the statewide level This approach ignores the developments of party politics at the sub-state level and results in an overly simplified understanding of party politics in Ukraine. The article starts with a literature review on its subject, states its hypotheses, and describes its analytical framework, a framework derived from insights from the literature on democratization and territorial politics. These results confirm that political cleavages in a regionally diverse post-communist state do not automatically mirror the statewide parties competition
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