Voting Stability, Political Gridlock: Ukraine's 1998 Parliamentary Elections

Abstract

MUCH OF THE INITIAL COMMENT on the 1998 Ukrainian elections focused on the strong performance of the Communist Party.1 The Communists did indeed emerge as the largest single force, with 24.65% of the list vote and 122 out of 450 seats in parliament (Verkhovna Rada). However, the real story of the elections was one of underlying stability and limited change.2 The elections confirmed overall voting patterns that were initially apparent in the transition elections of 1990-94. Ukraine still has no real national party system, only a set of local systems, but the sum total of these systems now seems to produce overall results that are fairly predictable. Although the Communists benefited from a realignment of forces within the left camp, the left as a whole won roughly the same proportion of votes and seats as in 1994 (40%), when the last parliamentary elections were held.3 The 1998 elections confirmed that the left parties command plurality, but not majority support.4 The nationalist or, in Ukrainian terminology, 'national-democratic' mainstream underperformed slightly on its traditional 20-25% with under 15% of the seats (Rukh, members of other rightist parties elected in single-member seats, plus independents). The far right won 2-3% of the vote, which, despite some commentators crowing at its failure to win significant numbers of seats,5 was roughly the same as in 1994 (see Table 1). The elections therefore confirmed the strictly limited base of support for Ukrainian ethnonationalism.6 Significant change came only in the political centre, which took the same proportion of seats as in 1994, but where proper political parties have now emerged for the first time. This article is in five parts. First, we give an overview of the election law used for the 1998 elections, followed by an examination of the main groups contesting the poll. We then describe the voter survey designed by the authors and conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology in the last two weeks of the election campaign and use its data to construct a model of party support. The voting results are then analysed in detail, before a final section discusses the process of faction formation in parliament after the elections.