The 1999 Ukrainian presidential election: Personalities, ideology, partisanship, and the economy

Slavic Review

Volumn 61, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 315-344

  Klobucar, Thomas F ^a   Miller, Arthur H ^a   Erb, Gwyn ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33947581928     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2697120     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Roman Szporluk, "Reflections on Ukraine after 1994: The Dilemmas of Nationhood," Harriman Review 7, nos. 7-9 (1994): 2.
2. Election results from the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Ukraine. Some agencies have reported irregularities in the 1999 election, but according to the U. S. Department of State, Country Report on Human Rights Practices: Ukraine (Washington, D.C., 2000), "almost all observers agreed that the election results reflected the will of the electorate" (1). It is possible that the CEC results do not reflect the exact percentages of votes cast by the Ukrainian population. However, 63 percent of our respondents reported voting for Kuchma, 32 percent for Symonenko, and 4 percent against all. The official CEC results are 56 percent for Kuchma, 38 percent for Symonenko, and 3.4 percent against all. Allowing for postelection identification with the winner, the CEC results appear quite reasonable, despite allegations of vote fraud.
3. The Directorate-General European Commission, Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, European Economy. Supplement C, Economic Reform Monitor (Luxembourg, 1996).
4. Donald R. Kinder and D. Roderick Kiewiet, "Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgments in Congressional Voting," American Journal of Political Science 23, no. 3 (August 1979): 495-527;
5. Stanley Feldman, "Economic Self-interest and Political Behavior," American Journal of Political Science 26, no. 3 (August 1982): 446-66;
6. James H. Kuklinski and Darrell M. West, "Economic Expectations and Voting Behavior in United States House and Senate Elections American Political Science Review 75, no. 2 (June 1981): 436-47;
7. Arthur H. Miller and Martin P. Wattenberg, "Throwing the Rascals Out: Policy Performance Evaluations of Presidential Candidates," American Political Science Review 79, no. 2 (June 1985): 359-72.
8. Michael B. MacKuen, Robert S. Erikson, and James A. Stimson, "Peasants or Bankers? The American Electorate and the U.S. Economy," American Political Science Review 86, no. 3 (September 1992): 597-611.
9. Angus Campbell, Phillip E. Convese, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York, 1960).
10. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor, 1988);
11. G. Bingham Powell and Guy D. Whitten, "A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context," American Journal of Political Science 37, no. 2 (May 1993): 391-414.
12. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections;
13. Denise V Powers and James H. Cox, "Echoes from the Past: The Relationship between Satisfaction with Economic Reforms and Voting Behavior in Poland," American Political Science Review 91, no. 3 (September 1997): 617-33.
14. Marco Bojcun, "The Ukrainian Parliamentary Election in March-April 1994," Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 2 (March 1995): 234;
15. Sarah Birch, "The Ukrainian Parliamentary and Presidential Elections of 1994, "Electoral Studies 14, no. 1 (March 1995): 93-99.
16. Bernard Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago, 1954).
17. Philip Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (London, 1964).
18. Miller and Wattenberg, "Throwing the Rascals Out"; George Rabinowitz and Stuart Elaine MacDonald, "A Directional Theory of Issue Voting," American Political Science Re-view 83, no. 1 (March 1989): 93-121;
19. Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
20. Norman H. Nie, Sidney Verba, and John R. Petrocik, The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).
21. Vicki Hesli and Volodymyr Chumachenko, "Issue Voting in Ukraine" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 1999).
22. For a recent discussion of these attitudes, see Ada Finifter and Ellen Mickiewicz, "Redefining the Political System of the USSR: Mass Support for Political Change," American Political Science Review 86, no. 4 (December 1992): 857-74;
23. and Arthur H. Miller, William M. Reisinger, and Vicki L. Hesli, "Understanding Political Change in Post-Soviet Societies: A Further Commentary on Finifter and Mickiewicz," American Political Science Review 90, no. 1 (March 1996): 153-66.
24. Hesli and Chumachenko, "Issue Voting in Ukraine."
25. Miller and Wattenberg, "Throwing the Rascals Out"; Arthur H. Miller, Martin P. Wattenberg, and Oksana Malanchuk, "Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates," American Political Science Review 80, no. 2 (June 1986): 521-40.
26. Donald Kinder, Mark Peters, Robert Abelson, and Susan Fiske, " Presidential Prototypes," Political Behavior 2 (1980): 315-37;
27. Miller, Reisinger, and Hesli, "Understanding Political Change in Post-Soviet Societies"; Arthur H. Miller, William M. Reisinger, and Vicki L. Hesli, "The Russian 1996 Presidential Election: Referendum on Democracy or a Personality Context," Electoral Studies 17, no. 2 (June 1996): 175-96.
28. See, for example, James Gibson, "Political and Economic Markets: Changes in the Connections between Attitudes toward Political Democracy and a Market Economy within the Mass Culture of Russia and Ukraine,"Journal of Politics 58 (November 1996): 954-84; Miller, Reisinger, and Hesli, "Understanding Political Change in Post-Soviet Societies"; Finifter and Mickiewicz, "Redefining the Political System of the USSR."
29. This measure, however, is quite strongly related to geography. Western Ukrainians were far more likely to feel proud of the flag (Pearson's r = .29). In addition, those in the western part of the country were also more likely to vote for Kuchma (Pearson's r =
30. John D. Huber, "Values and Partisanship in Left-Right Orientations: Measuring Ideology," European Journal of Political Research 17 (1989): 599-621.
31. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, 1990).
32. We hypothesize that these centrists are probably Ieaners, because few of them adopted centrist positions on the issue scales addressed in the following analysis. 21. John D. Huber, "Values and Partisanship in Left-Right Orientations: Measuring Ideology," European Journal of Political Research 17 (1989): 599-621.
33. 22. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, 1990). 23. We hypothesize that these centrists are probably leaners, because few of them adopted centrist positions on the issue scales addressed in the following analysis.
34. In making this calculation, we followed Benjamin I. Page and Calvin C. Jones, "Reciprocal Effects of Policy Preferences, Party Loyalties, and the Vote," American Political Science Review 73, no. 4 (December 1979): 1071-89. We subtracted respondents' self-placement on the communist-democrat scale from their placement of Kuchma and Symo-nenko on the same measure. The resulting distance measures (one for Kuchma, one for Symonenko) range from 0 to 6 (using absolute values for the differences obtained) where 0 means that respondents place the candidate and themselves at exactly the same place on the communist-democrat scale and 6 indicates that respondents place themselves and the candidate at opposite extremes on this continuum. Respondents were not asked to place Symonenko on the left-right scale, so we only have distance measures for Kuchma on this continuum. Both candidates, however, were placed on the communist-democrat scale.
35. Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry into Structures, Incentives, and Outcomes (New York, 1994).
36. Richard Rose, "Mobilizing Demobilized Voters in Post-Communist Societies" (paper presented at the Workshop on Public Opinion and Party Formation in Post-Communist and Authoritarian Democracies, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, 1995), 5;
37. Peter C. Ordeshook, "Reexamining Russia: Institutions and Incentives," Journal of Democracy 6 (April 1995): 46-60;
38. Peter Rutland, "Has Democracy Failed in Russia?" National Interest 38 (Winter 1994-95): 3-12.
39. Marco Bojcun, however, is an important exception. In his "The Ukrainian Parliamentary Election in March-April 1994," Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 2 (March 1995): 229-49, he notes that although less-informed voters might not have differentiated parties on ideological grounds at that time, parties were beginning to gain supporters and momentum as early as 1994.
40. Arthur H. Miller and Thomas F. Klobucar, "The Development of Party Identification in Post-Soviet Societies," American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 4 (October 2000): 667-86;
41. Arthur H. Miller, Gwyn Erb, William M. Reisinger, and Vicki L. Hesli, "Emerging Party Systems in Post-Soviet Societies: Fact or Fiction?" Journal of Politics 62 (1999): 455-90.
42. For a complete discussion of these conflict axes, see Miller and Klobucar, "The Development of Party Identification in Post-Soviet Societies."
43. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections.
44. 2 of .59 and predicting the correct vote for 95 percent of Kuchma's voters
45. Miller and Klobucar, "The Development of Party Identification in Post-Soviet Societies"; Arthur H. Miller, Thomas F. Klobucar, and William M. Reisinger, "Establishing Representation: Mass and Elite Political Attitudes in Ukraine," in Sharon L. Wolchik and Volodymyr Zviglyanich, eds., Ukraine: The Search for a National Identity (Lanham, Md., 1999), 213-35;
46. Grigory Nemiria, "Regionalism: An Underestimated Dimension of State-Building," in Wolchik and Zviglyanich, eds., Ukraine, 183-97; and Bojcun, "The Ukrainian Parliamentary Election in March-April 1994."
47. Campbell, Convese, Miller, and Stokes, The American Voter.
48. Bqjcun, "The Ukrainian Parliamentary Election in March-April 1994"; Birch, "The Ukrainian Parliamentary and Presidential Elections of 1994"; Szporluk, "Reflections on Ukraine after 1994."