Citizens’ Attitudes towards Institutional Change in Contexts of Political Turbulence: Support for Regional Decentralisation in Ukraine
| Author | Paul Chaisty,Stephen Whitefield |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321716684845 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
684845PSX0010.1177/0032321716684845Political StudiesChaisty and Whitefield
research-article2017
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Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(4) 824 –843
Citizens’ Attitudes towards
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Contexts of Political
Turbulence: Support for
Regional Decentralisation
in Ukraine
Paul Chaisty and Stephen Whitefield
Abstract
Most studies of public opinion regarding constitutional change focus on ‘winners’ and ‘losers’
in consolidated democracies, but in comparative terms most institutional change takes place in
unstable political contexts. We contend that mass preferences towards institutional choices are
likely to differ significantly in turbulent contexts as compared to stable polities. In this article, we
consider the issue of public preferences towards proposals for regional decentralisation in the
context of post-Soviet Ukraine, a society that has been in the throes of political change for the
last decade. Using surveys conducted in war-torn Ukraine in 2014, we find that under conditions
of political uncertainty, the institutional preferences of citizens are connected to group identities
and ideological orientations rather than instrumental concerns.
Keywords
constitutional choice, public opinion, Ukraine, centre–periphery relations, federalism
Accepted: 15 October 2016
Introduction
In 2014, tensions that had been latent in Ukrainian society and its immediate neighbour-
hood for much of the post-Soviet period descended into a violent conflict about the
contours of the Ukrainian state and its institutional structure. This conflict was inflamed
by different conceptions of the territorial organisation of Ukraine that had remained
unresolved during the political transition and ongoing turbulence of the previous
20 years. In the event, efforts to resolve the crisis centred on institutional reforms aimed
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Corresponding author:
Paul Chaisty, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Social Sciences
Building, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK.
Email: paul.chaisty@politics.ox.ac.uk
Chaisty and Whitefield
825
at decentralising power away from Kyiv. Consequently, Ukraine’s political elite and its
society were forced to confront the dilemma of constitutional change in conditions that
were not conducive to dispassionate debate.
The Ukrainian case is not unusual in this respect. Governments are frequently required
to make decisions about fundamental political rules during times of transition and crisis.
In such circumstances, mass mobilisation is common and the salience of institutional
issues is often high. Thus, mass acceptance of any constitutional settlement is certainly
highly desirable and possibly necessary to secure stability, which makes understanding
public preferences towards constitutional choices particularly important in explaining
how institutions are designed and emerge in these contexts.
Much of the literature on constitutional choices in democratising societies has been
heavily elite focused (e.g. Elster et al., 1998; Negretto, 2014). The extant analysis of
citizens’ constitutional preferences has largely centred on stable and consolidated
democracies – such as in the European Union (Gabel and Palmer, 1995), the UK
(Wenzel et al., 2000), and Canada (Nadeau et al., 1999) – and not on countries in condi-
tions of profound political change and civil or armed conflict where the very character of
the state itself is often in question. In stable contexts, the literature suggests, citizens base
their constitutional preferences mainly on instrumental concerns and partisan loyalties
(McLaren, 2006). But we ask, ‘Are such mechanisms likely to be relevant to how citizens
in transitional and politically polarised conditions make their constitutional choices?’ In
stable conditions, choices may be made materially and rationally; in unstable ones, they
may be made with emotion and uncertainty. How citizens make such choices, moreover,
is potentially of great importance to the constitutions that do emerge, with potential con-
sequences for subsequent political arrangements in that state. We therefore seek in this
article to extend the study of mass preferences towards institutional arrangements beyond
consolidated democracies to the common case of unstable polities.
We approach these questions through the lens of citizens’ views of the reform to the
territorial organisation of power in Ukraine at a time of great crisis in the country (December
2014) when a nationally representative survey was conducted by the authors. We find that
the institutional preferences of citizens were more likely to connect to certain group identi-
ties (especially ethnicity) and particular ideological orientations towards Ukraine’s place
in the world, the ethnic basis of citizenship and the market. We found little evidence to
substantiate the view that instrumental or economic considerations were an important fac-
tor shaping preferences about the desired constitutional outcome, even taking into account
the possibility that identities in Ukraine have instrumental consequences.
Our results therefore contribute to an ongoing debate in the literature on the social
and ideological bases of public opinion in Ukraine (Hale et al., 2015; Hesli, 1995;
Kubicek, 2000; Pirie, 1996), much of which has sought to debunk the idea that political
behaviour can be understood in terms of ethnicity or a Ukrainophone and Russophone
cleavage (Kuzio, 1998: 75–79). This is not what we can conclude based on our analysis.
Moreover, although our findings are subject to the usual limitations of cross-sectional
data derived from a single case study, they also suggest the need for a more general
re-evaluation of how different political contexts contribute to constitutional settlements
and to the nature of the constitutions themselves. In particular, our findings suggest the
need to think in a different way about institutional preferences in the very different set of
cases of turbulent polities.
The rest of this article deals first with existing theories of the factors shaping public
preferences towards constitutional issues, then with the political context in which
826
Political Studies 65 (4)
Ukrainians made institutional judgements in 2014 and then with the findings from analy-
ses of national survey data collected by the authors in late 2014. We conclude by discuss-
ing the implications of our findings for the broader literature.
Mass Preferences and Institutional Choice in Stable and
Unstable Polities
Citizens in consolidated democracies do have opportunities to influence the institutions
that govern them (Wenzel et al., 2000), in particular through referenda. Scholars have
debated the significance of a number of factors that shape public opinion on these consti-
tutional matters: the ‘salience’ of the substantive issues being addressed (Franklin et al.,
1994; Siune and Svensson, 1993); group-level identities – national, religious, regional
and so on (Hooghe and Marks, 2004); and instrumental considerations – do citizens
expect to be ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ under the new arrangements? (Gabel and Palmer, 1995;
Hobolt and Wratil, 2015; McLaren, 2006). In this literature, instrumental accounts tend to
predominate. This fits well theoretically with what we would expect of a stable polity.
When citizens have clearly established interests and institutional change is incremental,
parties are able to articulate potential benefits and losses to their supporters.
Yet institutional choice is not only the preserve of consolidated democracies. It is self-
evident that societies in the throes of building new political systems will have to confront
decisions on how to institutionalise the redistribution of power. This is highlighted by
Figure 1, which summarises frequencies for ‘constitutional events’1 in all political sys-
tems ranked by Polity IV as either open anocracies or democracies from the start of the
Figure 1. Regime Duration and the Frequency of ‘Constitutional Events’.
Chaisty and Whitefield
827
Third Wave in 1974 to 2013.2 As can be seen, the frequency of constitutional change falls
year-on-year as regimes become more established, with a steep decline following the first
years of the new regimes.3 Notwithstanding the skewed nature of these data – the majority
of regimes in the Polity subset had existed for only 15 years or less – they show that the
modal context for constitutional choice in the Third Wave is quite different from that
which features in most public opinion research on constitutional choice. This context
involves considerable crisis and instability. Of the constitutional events coded by the
Comparative Constitutions Project, 15% occurred during or within 1 year of a major
episode of political violence. Such violent episodes covered international, civil and ethnic
wars that resulted in ‘at least 500 directly-related deaths’ (Marshall, 2016: 2). Furthermore,
constitutional change frequently occurred in regimes that lacked stable political institu-
tions. Regimes coded by Polity IV as undergoing periods of institutional instability –
central authority interruption, collapse or transition – experienced a constitutional event
in 18% of cases. Thus, the...
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