An aligning election and the Ukrainian political community

East European Politics and Societies

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 4-27

  Colton, Timothy J ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Alignment; Election; Identity; President; Ukraine

Indexed keywords

EID: 78651237403     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: 15338371     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325410388561     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. See especially V. O. Key, "A Theory of Critical Elections," Journal of Politics 17 (Feb. 1955): 3-18.
2. Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, NY: Norton, 1970).
3. David R. Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). A helpful guide to the comparative literature on realignment, de-alignment, and related topics may be found at the homepage on public opinion and political behaviorin the website of the European Consortium for Political Research: http://povb-ecpr.org/node/25.
4. For Ukraine, the point is discussed with particular clarity in Lowell W. Barrington and Erik S. Herron, "One Ukraine or Many? Regionalism in Ukraine and Its Political Consequences," NationalitiesPapers 32 (Mar. 2004): 53-86.
5. For a contrary view, see John O'Loughlin, "The Regional Factor in Contemporary Ukrainian Politics: Scale, Place, Space, or Bogus Effect?" Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 42 (Jan. 2001): 1-33.
6. The main exception is the survey-based project reported in Thomas F. Klobucar, Arthur H., and Gwyn Erb, " The 1999 Ukrainian Presidential Election: Personalities, Ideology, Partisanship, and the Economy,"Slavic Review 61 (Summer 2002):315-44. Related work of some interest has come out of the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Study, a German-funded panel survey project executed by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology and designed primarily to investigate labor markets in Ukraine. One paper has related social indicators gleaned in survey waves done in the spring of 2003 and the spring of 2004 to voting intentions many months before the 2004 presidential election.
7. See Amelie Constant, Martin Kahanec, and Klaus F. Zimmerman, "The Russian-Ukrainian Political Divide" (Discussion Paper no. 2530, Forschunginstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, Bonn, Dec. 2006).
8. See notably Gary King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
9. Gary King, Martin Abba Tanner, and Ori Rosen, eds., Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
10. Jason Wittenberg, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
11. We can only sigh in envy of the analysts of Mexican elections who get to work with data from some twenty-four hundred municipalities.
12. The main prior efforts to examine Ukrainian elections by means of aggregate data have been done by James I. Clem and Peter R. Craumer. See their "Ukraine's Emerging Electoral Geography: A Regional Analysis of the 1999 Parliamentary Elections," Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 39 (Jan.-Feb. 1999): 1-26.
13. "Shades of Orange: The Electoral Geography of Ukraine's 2004 Presidential Elections," Eurasian Geography and Economics 46 (July-Aug. 2005): 364-85.
14. "Orange, Blue and White, and Blonde: The Electoral Geography of Ukraine's 2006 and 2007 Rada Elections," Eurasian Geography and Economics 49 (Mar.-Apr. 2008): 127-51. Clem and Craumer limit their quantitative analysis to the rudimentary tool of bivariate correlation coefficients.
15. In the qualifying round, there were six presidential nominees registered in 1991, seven in 1994, thirteen in 1999, twenty-five in 2004, and eighteen in 2010.
16. The scatter plots, and the conclusions taken from them, would be rather different if we were to use the number of votes cast in the territory rather than the proportions. But such "flow of the vote" analysis is a tricky exercise, as the raw figures are sensitive to demographic trends (national and local), turnout levels, and alienated behavior (spoiled ballots and votes against all the candidates registered), in addition to the pattern of relative support for the candidates.
17. It is not the exact inverse because a certain proportion of the participating electorate either voted against all (or both) candidates or spoiled their ballots.
18. I owe this formulation to Erik Herron, in feedback on an early draft of the article.
19. Sarah Birch, "The Ukrainian Parliamentary and Presidential Elections of 1994," Electoral Studies 14 (Mar. 1995): 97.
20. As in Figures 2 through 5, the chart represents proportions of the popular vote in the provinces, not raw numbers. Total votes for Yanukovych declined between 2004 and 2010 by 2,322,000 in the first round and by 367,000 in the runoff. His electorate in the first round was so much smaller than in 2004 not only because his vote share was lower (by nearly 4 percent) but because turnout in the election was about 8 percent lower, there was slightly more alienated behavior at the polling stations, and the Ukrainian electorate had dwindled in size by 2 percent. Of the two finalists, Tymoshenko did much worse relative to her 2004 analogue, Yushchenko. In 2010 she polled 5,029,000 fewer raw votes in the first round than Yushchenko had in 2004, and 3,522,000 fewer votes in the runoff. From this point of view, one might say that Tymoshenko lost the 2010 election as much as Yanukovich won it. The decline in the number of minor candidates in 2010 (there were nine who received less than 2 percent of the vote, as compared to twenty in 2010) seems to have been irrelevant to support levels for the two A-list candidates.
21. In the election of 1999, the vote for Leonid Kuchma was 87.7 percentage points higher than in 1994 in Lviv province and 88.4 points higher in Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk. In 2004, Yanukovych's vote share dropped off catastrophically compared to Kuchma's in 1999 in these same three places: by 89.5percentage points in Ternopil, 89.4 in Ivano-Frankivsk, and 86.9 in Lviv.
22. Frederick Jackson Turner, "Geographic Sectionalism in American History," Annals of the American Association of Geographers 16 (June 1926): 85. Other foundational work on what came to be termed "historical geography" and "cultural geography" was done several decades after Turner by Karl O. Sauer.
23. Gwendolyn Sasse, "The 'New' Ukraine: A State of Regions," Regional and Federal Studies 11 (2001): 75.
24. "Administrative, political, historical, socioeconomic and cultural definitions of regions are used alongside each other without clear distinctions." Ibid.
25. Dominique Arel, "The Hidden Face of the Orange Revolution: Ukraine in Denial towards Its Regional Problem," translation by Arel of "La face cachée de la Révolution Orange: l'Ukraine en negation face à son problème regional," Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest 37 (Dec. 2006).
26. Crimea adds the wrinkle of having been part of the Russian republic of the USSR until it was peremptorily transferred to Ukrainian jurisdiction in 1954.
27. These three were the only Ukrainian provinces to have voted against preservation of the USSR in the Soviet referendum of March 1991, and they did so by decisive margins, with only 16.4 percent supporting preservation in Lviv, 18.2 percent in Ivano-Frankivsk, and 19.3 percent in Ternopil. They also voted strongly in favor of a separate referendum proposition demanding Ukrainian independence.
28. See Sarah Birch, "Electoral Behaviour in Western Ukraine in National Elections and Referendums, 1989-91,"
29. Europe-Asia Studies 47 (Nov. 1995): 1145-76. This paper looks mostly at variation within the West section but has much to say about the section as a whole.
30. Kuchma's margin of victory in all of Ukraine in 1999 was 5,186,000 votes. In the West alone, it was 4,665,000.
31. In the East, Yanukovych's vote share fell only in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, where he in any case still hauled in 90.4 and 89.0 percent, respectively. In Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhia oblasts, his 2010 vote share was higher than in 2004.
32. In the Russian presidential election of 2008, the Kremlin candidate, Medvedev, took more than 90 percent of the popular vote in four of eighty-three provinces, all of them ethnic republics: Mordoviya (90.3 percent), Karachayevo-Cherkessiya (90.4 percent), Ingushetiya (91.7 percent), and Dagestan (91.9 percent). The difference between the two countries is that in Russia a single monoculture reigns in the entire political space, in varying degrees, while in Ukraine there is more than one monoculture, plus hotly contested areas.
33. See Oleh Protsyk, "Majority-Minority Relations in the Ukraine" at http://www.ecmi.de/jemie/indextitle.html, citing a ten-year monitoring survey. Protsyk has everyday Ukrainophones at 42 percent of the population in 2005 and everyday Russophones at 36 percent. Another study, by Volodymyr Kulyk, based on a single in-depth survey, has everyday Russophones summing to 41 percent and everyday Ukrainophones to 35 percent. Kulyk also breaks the ethnic Ukrainians into subgroups, showing that everyday Ukrainophones among them (46 percent) are fewer than the combined numbers of everyday Russophones (27 percent) and speakers of both languages (27 percent). Volodymyr Kulyk, "Language Policy in Ukraine: What People Want the State to Do" (Unpublished paper for Sciences Po-Association for the Study of Nationalities conference on Empires and Nations, Paris, 3-5 July 2008), available at valerytishkov.ru/engine/documents/document1221.doc.
34. In Lviv oblast, the most populous region in the West section, Yanukovych took only 8.6 percent of the popular vote in the runoff and Tymoshenko 86.2 percent. In that ethnic Ukrainians account for 94.8 percent of the Lviv population and native Ukrainophones for 95.3 percent, most anti-Yanukovych (pro-Tymoshenko) voters might have come from those groups. In Donetsk oblast, however, Yanukovych took 90.4 percent of the popular vote in an area where 56.9 percent of people are ethnic Ukrainians and 24.1 percent are native Ukrainophones.
35. The correlation (Pearson's r) between ethnic Ukrainians' share of provincial the regional population and the second-round Yanukovych vote is.81; between the percentage identifying Ukrainian as their native tongue and the vote, it is.89. Between the ethnic and linguistic indicators, the correlation is.97. Discrimination between the effects of the ethnic and linguistic variables would be possible only with data containing a much larger number of observations.
36. The Orange Revolution election of 2004 would be especially hard to imagine as one pitting economic winners against losers. Prime Minister Yanukovych lost during a year in which the Ukrainian economy grew by more than 10 percent. And his archrival, Yushchenko, was a former prime minister and finance minister who had presided over the first phase of the boom. Candidates who tried to capitalize on economic discontent did poorly in 2004.
37. I played with several other indicators of ascriptive social background here as well, such as average levels of urbanization and education. None proved consistently useful. If we had a more commodious number of data points, some of them quite likely would.
38. Vicki L. Hesli, William M. Reisinger, and Arthur H. Miller, "Political Party Development in Divided Societies: The Case of Ukraine," Electoral Studies 17 (June 1998): 244.
39. Klobucar, Miller, and Erb, "1999 Ukrainian Presidential Election," 329.
40. Sarah Birch, "The Presidential Election in Ukraine, October 1999," Electoral Studies 21 (June 2002): 345.
41. Keith Darden, Resisting Occupation: Mass Schooling and the Creation of Durable National Loyalties (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2011).
42. Kirsten Zimmer, "The Comparative Failure of Machine Politics, Administrative Resources, and Fraud," Canadian Slavonic Papers 47 (Sept.-Dec. 2005): 372. Zimmerman's 2005 article concluded that Yanukovych and the POR had failed to sell their model in the national political market. After Yanukovych's victory in 2010, this inference seems at a minimum premature.
43. Birch, "Presidential Election in Ukraine," 339.
44. Arel, "The Hidden Face of the Orange Revolution," 34.
45. Henry A. Hale, "Ukraine: The Uses of Divided Power," Journal of Democracy 21 (July 2010): 94.