Soviet Legacies of Economic Development, Oligarchic Rule, and Electoral Quality in Eastern Europe's Partial Democracies: The Case of Ukraine

Abstract

Can economic development retard democracy, defying expectations of classic modernization theorizing? If so, under what conditions? Our article addresses the puzzle of poor democratic performance in highly urbanized and industrialized postcommunist states. We assembled an original dataset with data from Ukraine's local and national elections and constructed district- (rayon) and region- (oblast) level indices of electoral quality. Regions and districts that score higher on developmental indices also score lower on electoral quality, including in Ukraine's Western regions conventionally considered more democratic than the predominantly Russian-speaking Eastern regions. We explain these outcomes with reference to the peculiarities of Soviet industrial development, which facilitated the emergence of "oligarchs" in territories housing Soviet-era mega-industries. Our research contributes to comparative debates about the links between economic development and democracy.

Dictators and Their Subjects: Authoritarian Attitudinal Effects and Legacies

“…Although authoritarian regimes often try to remake the societies over which they rule to facilitate more effective societal control, even the most ambitious, sustained, and murderous attempts along these lines (such as communist collectivization) have not succeeded in creating completely uniform societies (see, for example, Lankina & Libman, 2019). Such societal heterogeneity is bound to interact with even the most top-down authoritarian political projects and, therefore, we expect them to moderate the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of these regimes.…”

The Two-Pronged Middle Class: The Old Bourgeoisie, New State-Engineered Middle Class, and Democratic Development

“…One way to deal with this issue is to deploy the more generic index of democratic competitiveness (IDC). Although this simple formula (Vanhanen 2000) was developed to gauge national-level democratic variations, several studies have validated it at the level of subnational politics in contexts as diverse as India and Ukraine (Beer and Mitchell 2006;Lankina and Libman 2019). The index is based on two indicators: participation (electoral turnout) and competition (vote share for a candidate except those with the highest share of votes).…”

The Complex Imprint of Foreign Rule: Tracking Differential Legacies along the Administrative Hierarchy

“…Yom 2011;Wibbels 2009), 1 neither systematic theory nor empirical test to explain possible divergence in the effects of foreign rule along the administrative hierarchy exist. This is surprising because previous studies have examined the legacies of empires in a vast array of dimensions, including political-economic structures (Acemoglu et al 2001(Acemoglu et al , 2002Lankina and Getachew 2012;Lankina and Libman 2019;Nathan 2019;Paine 2019), legal systems (Acemoglu et al 2011;La Porta et al 1997;Mendelski and Libman 2014), the provision of public goods (Di Liberto and Sideri 2015;Guardado 2018;Lee and Schultz 2012), and public administration/ state authority (Becker et al 2016;Lange 2004;Pierskalla et al 2017). 2 The analysis of how administrative institutions in particular are affected by external factors is of special relevance to scholars of comparative and international political economy (CPE and IPE) for two reasons: First, these institutions determine the government's capacity to both coerce citizens and promote economic growth (Grundholm and Thorsen 2019;Hanson 2014;Mann 2008;Mattingly 2020;Slater 2008;Soifer 2013;Vogler 2023, forthcoming;Vu 2007).…”