What Has Changed in Ukrainian Politics?: Assessing the Implications of the Orange Revolution

Understanding the foreign policy of autocratic actors: ideology or pragmatism? Russia and the Tymoshenko trial as a case study

“…In the first half of the 2000s, Ukraine provided one of the most clear-cut cases of Russian intervention in the role of an anti-democratic external actor (D'Anieri 2005a, 2005b, Kuzio 2005, Way 2005. This was partly due to the nature of Ukrainian politics during this period, when individual actors' stances towards democracy were strongly correlated with their foreign policy orientations.…”

Horizontal accountability during political transition

“…Although most parties were weak prior to the Orange Revolution, they could be grouped within broadly defined partisan camps which we label 'Orange' for those associated with the pre-Orange Revolution opposition and 'Blue' 4 for those associated with the pre-Orange Revolution ruling group. 5 After the Orange Revolution, and leading to the 2006 parliamentary election, party identities strengthened in part due to institutional reforms initiated in 2004: constitutional change reducing the power of the president, abandonment of the mixed electoral system in favour of proportional representation, and formalization of an imperative mandate (D'Anieri, 2005). In the wake of these modifications, the Party of Regions emerged as the leading force supporting the pro-Yanukovych forces, and Our Ukraine and the Bloc of Yuliya Tymoshenko emerged as the strongest opposition parties alongside the long-standing Socialist Party and Communist Party.…”

Remittances, Spending, and Political Instability in Ukraine

“…The Orange Revolution was a turning point not only in the history of Ukraine, but also the most significant political event in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990. Falsification of results during the second round of the presidential elections caused a wave of massive protests and started a period of political transformation in Ukraine (D'Anieri, 2005). The Revolution was about political development toward an "open society" and change of political regime in Ukraine (Arel, 2005).…”