Property and Political Community: Democracy, Oligarchy, and the Case of Ukraine

Abstract

Widening wealth gaps in Western democracies have brought new scrutiny to relationships between property and political community. For the prior quarter century, Western legal scholars have urged privatization around the globe as the key to a virtuous circle of "market democracy." This Article traces the origins of the market democracy consensus to ideas that identify positive features of political community-liberty, wealth, or democracy-with private property ownership. Fieldwork in Ukraine, where Western privatization advice was followed at a time of founding a new polity, provides data to compare predictions with outcomes. Two unexpected figures-the Oligarch and the Precariat-emerge from the newly privatized countryside. Research into the micropractices of privatization counter-intuitively exposes private property as potentially working against democracy. The findings from this research are that oligarchy is a possibility, distribution is a problem, and relationships between property and democracy are not always mutually felicitous.

The intervention of oligarchy in the Indonesian legislative process

“…Winter's theory is useful in discussing oligarchy's role in Indonesian politics, where it can be considered a political strategy for obtaining power through controlling (a) access to material resources and (b) capital power. The literature also finds that oligarchy embeds the ability of the ultra-rich to gain and perpetuate power, maximize and manage the control system, perpetuate the ascendant status quo and expand and consolidate their wealth (Aspinall, 2014(Aspinall, , 2003Eppinger, 2015;Hutchinson et al, 2002;Ramseyer and Rosenbluth, 1998). Winters (2011) suggests that oligarchs are actors who overwhelm the partypolitical system to increase their social position and wealth.…”

Litigating for legality: Nature conservation, commercial fisheries and disputed territoriality in Ukraine's Danube Delta

“…While socio‐legal scholarship about post‐Soviet citizens' relationship to courts and litigation can help understand fishing firms', fishermen's and DBR administrators' legal conundrums, it does not provide a clear‐cut answer as to why litigation was pursued. In Ukraine, scholars have highlighted issues such as the “weak demand for the rule of law” (Burlyuk, 2015), the politicization of justice (Popova, 2012), the impact of the state bureaucracy's (mal)functioning on lower civil courts (Kurkchiyan, 2013), bureaucratic corruption (Zaloznaya, 2017), and how private property's introduction undermined democratic community formation (Eppinger, 2015). On the one hand, they note high levels of litigation among Ukrainian and Russian citizens (Hendley, 2015; Popova, 2012).…”

Marking time on the way to democracy in Ukraine: A causal layered analysis

“…Among them, one can distinguish (1) internal factors—historical (experience and traditions), political (the quality of institutions, elites, and civil society), economic (diversification and economic development), sociocultural (type of political culture, quality of education, and certain psychological characteristics of the population), and (2) external factors—international political environment including the situation in neighboring countries or global and regional leaders, and the deliberate influence of international actors on the situation in a specific country (Sukhorolska, 2015: 262). As for Ukraine, the most frequently mentioned internal factors preventing the consolidation of democracy include Soviet and other historical legacies (Kuzio, 2011; Prizel, 1997: 331–335), lack of the rule of law and weak democratic institutions (Kubiček, 2001), great political and economic influence of oligarchs (Åslund, 2005: 7–11; Eppinger, 2015: 891), and poor economic development (Åslund, 2009). Key external factors seem to be Russia’s foreign policy (increasingly based on an imperial worldview) and lack of support and pressure from the West (Kuzio, 2011: 108).…”