Soviet legacies of economic development, oligarchic rule, and electoral quality in Eastern Europe’s partial democracies: the case of Ukraine

Tomila V. Lankina and Alexander Libman

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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.

JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cis, nep-pol, nep-tra and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Comparative Politics, October, 2019, 52(1), pp. 127 - 176. ISSN: 0010-4159

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/88775/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:88775

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().