The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy: Power Sharing, Regionalism, and Authoritarianism

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Nataliya Kibita, Affiliate Researcher, Oxford School of Global and Area

Speaker: Nataliya Kibita, Affiliate Researcher, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford.

Discussant: Nicholas Aylott, Associate Professor of Political Science at Södertörn University.

Chair: Olena Podolian, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CBEES, and Project Researcher, School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University.

Abstract:
Ukraine and Russia are today at opposite points of the political spectrum. Despite three hundred years of full submersion into Russian authoritarian politics, Ukraine rejects authoritarianism. To explain why and how Ukraine’s road diverged from Russia’s, this monograph investigates the origins of regionalism in Ukraine, which is at the foundation of the Ukrainian institutional system. ‘Weak centre, strong regions’ was characteristic of both Ukraine and Russia in the early post-Soviet years. However, what was a detour for Russia was a long-standing framework in Ukraine. The story follows the relationship between Moscow, Kyiv and the Ukrainian regions in the period from spring 1917 to summer 1994. Based on new archival material and guided by the theory of institutions, the book examines how interlinked political and economic incentives and constraints determined the opportunities and institutional interests of the Ukrainian leadership and those of the Ukrainian regions and how the institutional framework affected the dynamic of the relationship between the central leadership in Moscow, the Ukrainian leadership and the regions. The volume shows that once established, the configuration of ‘weak centre, strong regions’ did not change, not even when the Soviet centralised party-state system collapsed. The failure by the Ukrainian leadership to re-configure the interplay of incentives and constraints that dictated the behaviour of the Ukrainian regions determined not only the insignificance of the disintegration of the Soviet system, but also the institutional weakness of the new Ukrainian executive branch and the failure by President Kravchuk to establish some form of authoritarian rule.

Nataliya Kibita is a scholar of 20th century Ukrainian history and institutional change. She holds a bachelor's degree from the Ostroh Academy (Ukraine) and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Geneva (Switzerland). She taught at LSE, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow. Since 2019, she has been a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow. She is currently a Visiting Academic at Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford.