Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics (2008) 8:111-134
Too Much Cleavage? Regional Implications for Democratic Consolidation in Post-Communist Ukraine Alexander Jakubow, University of Richmond* By examining democratic institutional developments within post-communist Ukraine, this paper challenges the conventional political wisdom positing that patterns of democratization are necessarily inhibited by high levels of societal fragmentation. In the case of Ukraine, these societal cleavages only become inimical to greater democratic institutionalization when combined with the variety of preexisting administrative and institutional characteristics within the Ukrainian political system. Such factors include the nature of Ukraine’s problematic semi-presidential model of government, a weak and fragmented political party system, and the abuse of administrative resources by political incumbents. The effects of such intervening factors are measured by analyses of parliamentary voting patterns, presidential-parliamentary interactions, and coercive clientelistic linkages under the Kuchma presidency with respect to a quadraregional model. Secondly, from a methodological perspective, this paper contends that conceptualizing societal cleavages in regional, as opposed to ethnic or linguistic, terms is a more accurate unit of analysis to be used in the examination, comparison, and categorization of social difference.
The socio-political foundations of the modern Ukrainian state rest precariously upon a heterogeneous substructure of ethnolinguistic, economic, and regional variance. For Ukrainian political leaders and state-builders, the successful accommodation of the multifarious, often conflicting interests that emerged from these social and geographic realities within an appropriate institutional framework has hitherto remained elusive. Ukraine’s road to democracy, therefore, occupies a unique space within the collective narrative of Eastern European, post-communist political development. In *
An earlier version of this paper won First Place in the Pi Sigma Alpha 2008 Best Undergraduate Class Paper competition. The author would like to thank Aleksandra Snzajder, John Whelan, Ellis West, and Vincent Wang, as well as his fellow senior seminar participants at the University of Richmond for their encouragement, support, and critical eyes throughout the duration of this project. Special thanks as well go to Jan Kubik of the Rutgers Political Science Department. He is also very grateful to the editorial team of The Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics for guidance in preparing this manuscript for publication. This paper will be presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.