Ukrainian Protests (2013-2014) in the context of Multiple Cleavages: main explanatory factors and foundations

Author : Vladimir Kozlov, Associate Professor , Higher School of EconomicsCo-author : Dmitry Zaytsev, Associate Professor , Higher School of Economics

Second Co-author : Anastasia Galina, Master student, Higher School of Economics

Introduction

For the last decade, the current political crisis in Ukraine has become an unprecedented political case not only in this country but in the post-Soviet space in a whole, considering the magnitude of political changes pending to regime change, mass political frustration, a surge and progressive increase of civic engagement, continuing economic, social and political crisis, international relations instability leading to the military conflict and sharp division of populationinto those who support European integration and its antagonists.

Retrospectively, on November, 2013 the decision of a former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych to freeze and abandon an agreement with the European Union prevented the Association Agreement from being signed at the Eastern Partnership Summit. The immediate subsequence was the peaceful EU supporting protest in central Kiev, when several hundred students started to occupy MaidanNezalezhnosti (Independence Square). The following riot police attack has escalated into the violent crackdown with more than 30 people injured and dozens arrested. (Garces de los Fayos & Romanysgyn, 2013; Wittkowsky, 2014)

The foregoing events have become a political trigger for a series of mass protests, turned out to be the most powerful and large scale movement appeared in every single region of Ukraine, widely known as “Euromaidan” (Tucker, Metzger, & Barbera, 2014). If we use objective data (number of capturing of administrative buildings by the Euromaidan activists; number of activists participated in the Euromaidan my protests) we can find that the movement was widespread almost in all regions of the country.

The uniqueness and relevance of Euromaidan phenomenon lies in a trigging power of this event, which provoked significant political changes and could be seen in the context of nation building and democratization of Ukraine.

Obviously, the Ukrainian crisis and Euromaidan in particular have already gained scholars/academicians/scientists attention. Based on our observation, the existing research can be segregated into two groups which are the following:

1. Euromaidan phenomenon studies, aimed to examine such issues as the reasons and main consequences, polls-based participants’ structure of Euromaidan etc(Tucker et al., 2014; Scheide & Schmid, 2014; Pishchikova & Ogryzko, 2014)

2. Ukrainian revolution and nation building, political changes and reforms caused by Euromaidan, and (Mikhelidze, 2014;Baran, 2015;Smilov, 2015; Peisakhin, 2015).

We consider Euromaidan as a clue indicator, important factor and symbolic event, leading to the national building and democratization. Therefore, the scientific novelty of this research lies in attempt to unite the above mentioned existing research directions and to look at the Euromaidan as at the clue event for national building and democratization.

The “classical” theory which explains national-democratic development of the countries is the theory was elaborated and proposed by Seymour Martin Lipsetand Stein Rokkan in 1967. According to this theory “conflicts and controversies can arise out of a great variety of relationships in the social structure, but only a few of these tend to polarize the politics of any given system”(Seymour Martin Lipset & Rokkan, 1990). They distinguish four critical lines of cleavagefor nation building if western civilization after the Industrial Revolution: Centre-Periphery, State-Church, Rural-Urban and Employers-Workers(Seymor Martin Lipset & Rokkan, 1967).

We suppose that the theory gives the basic explanation of party system construction and the political attitudes in modern Ukraine, and, what is the most important, predicts the possible cleavages of nation-building and democratic development.

Intending to study Euromaidan through the prism of Lippset and Rokkan theory, we suppose that Euromaidan has caused any cleavages in the Ukrainian society. However, there are existing grounds for Lippset and Rokkan critique. At first, we can assume that this theory has lost its relevance due to the time passed from the year it was proposed. Moreover, the Lipset& Rokkan theoretical framework was relevant for the analysis of nation Building in the European States “including Southern Europe (excluding the Balkans) and Nordic Europe (Scandinavia and Finland) but excluding Eastern Europe (orthodox countries as well as Hungary although occasionally including Poland and Russia" (Seymour Martin Lipset & Rokkan, 1990).

Furthermore, the criticism exists from the point of “new” cleavages theories, which propose new factors for the cleavages emergence. Those theories are the materialism vs post materialism theory(Inglehart & Abramson, 1999; Schwartz, 2006; Schwartz et al., 2012) and winners and losers of integration and globalization (Bartolini and Mair 1990; Bartolini 2000; Karvonen and Kuhnle 2000; Rogowski 1989).

The research question: considering the Euromaidan an indicator of nation building and democratization, what are the reasons that influence on national-democratic development of Ukraine in 2013-2014? How the existing cleavages can be considered as a factors of Ukraine population division?

Therefore, the main research objective is to find out social, political, economic, and cultural foundations for cleavages in Ukrainian society: supporters and antagonists of Euromaydan.

By our hypothesis the above mentioned division in Ukrainian society on supporters and antagonists of Euromaydan is mainly explained by the materialism vs post-materialism and globalists vs. anti-globalists cleavages than by regional characteristics (Eastern versus Western Ukraine) and traditional Lipset& Rokkan ones.

One of the important outcomes of the research will be the debate with the widespread stereotype in common academic and analytical discourses about the strict West-East dimension that influence on Ukrainian political development and political changes. However we do not argue against the differences between Ukrainian macroregions in electoral behaviour (West-East cleavage started to be well pronounced there since Presidential elections on 2004), demographic differences (in some cases they are more rural-urban, than spatial), regional differences in economic development (there is no West-East difference here)

Therefore, we argue that "new cleavages" could be more relevant to explain current social and political situation in Ukraine.

To test our hypothesis we use the data from ESS (6 wave) that was organized and conducted in Ukraine on July and August 2013 (3-4 months prior the “Euromaisan”). In our opinion the tension in society and antagonism towards the current government was already high at this time period. Hence the persons with the negative attitudes towards situation in the country were the main driving force of civil demonstration against Yanukovich regime.

To confirm the main hypothesis we have managed to build a regression model.

As dependant variables we use the following ones:

  • The political activity index constructed from the participation of the respondents in different civil actions (manifestations, petitions, boycotts, working for parties and civil movements etc) with alpha-cronbach coefficient more than 0.9.
  • The satisfaction with economic situation, government and democracy (3 independently included variables)
  • The trust in current legal and political (parliament) systems.
  • The experience in demonstrations participation

As independent variables we use:

  • For Lipset & Rokkan hypothesis – dummy variables for the residence (especially living in urban areas and regional centres), different confessions belongings, language used at home, share of urban population in the region (as a macrolevel variable), employment status (employees versus self-employed)
  • For the West-East theory. The share of ethnic Ukrainians in the regional population, geographical dummies (for Eastern, Southern, Western and Central regions as well as for the East-Western region). Also we included other macrolevel indicators like avarege salary, share of pensioners, unemployment rates
  • For the theory of political participation we used the voting on the Parliament elections 2012 results from ESS as well as the share of Yanukovich’s party supporters on the regional (macro) level. This indicator was interacted with the regional (East-West) dummies.
  • For the globalization winners-loosers theory we used the educational level of respondents, assuming that the educated persons are more flexible and opened for changes.
  • Schwartz value varibles

As control variables we used demographic ones: age, gender and partner status as well as the respondents income.

We used basic OLS regressions with robust standard errors, logit models (for the experience in demonstrations) and multilevel regressions (for variables on the macrolevel).

Findings

In urban areas people trust a little bit stronger in political system, but in urban areas of Central Ukraine this situation is changing to the negative.Urban population is more satisfied with the economic situation and the democracy. It is generally explained by the relatively higher levels of satisfaction among the smaller town (not regional centers and their suburbs). Generally this phenomenon explains why there is no difference between center and periphery. People from countryside as well as the persons from the suburbs or outskirts of a big cities trust less to the legal system.

There are no differences in political activity and satisfaction between employees and self-employed or/and business owners. Mainly it is explained by the low share of self-employed population.

Religion. The Roman Catholics demonstrate the lower level of satisfaction of government and higher level of political activity. However the satisfaction with democracy is increasing with the individual religiosity. For Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics and other non-Ortodox confessions the growing religiosity is associated with lower satisfaction of democracy. Religious Roman Catholics are satisfied with governance while the Greek Catholics are less satisfied.

There are no differences between Russian and Ukrainian speaking regions in government the satisfaction and trust as well as the economic and democratic satisfaction.However on the individual level the satisfaction of economic, democracy and government satisfaction is higher among families speaking Russian at home.

High education level is a perfect predictor of the lower satisfaction of economic and political situation and higher level of political activity. Even in the more satisfied in current political situation regions. Higher educated persons in South-East are less satisfied with democracy (while the whole region is satisfied). However if we look at the macro-regions (not mega ones) we find that the effect of higher education on the regional level is not pronounced: in all regions higher educated persons trust and satisfied with the governance less.

The urban population (especially in case of regional centers) have intuitively much higher probability of the experience in political manifestation and demonstrations. Persons with higher education 2,7 times more likely participate in demonstrations, while the income levels and poverty have no robust and significant effect on demonstration participations. For Eastern regions the probability of demonstrations participation is lower especially in comparison with Central regions (Kiev is situated there), but these differences are not significant.

Those who voted for Yanukovich’s party satisfied with economic situation, political situation, democracy; trust in political system and legal system (it is intuitively understandable and may be caused by reverse causality: they are satisfied, because they voted)

In comparison with Eastern regions the satisfaction of political situation and democracy is going down in all other macroregions (East, Centre and West), while there are no significant differences between so-called West (West+ Centre) and South-East (East+South). So it could be explained by the concentration of political elites among Eastern Ukrainian group (Donbass) that is not supported widely by all other regions (including Southern pro-Russian ones)

Also with growing education the satisfaction with political situation, democracy and the peoples’ trust in political and legal system is going down (but not the satisfaction with economic situation)

Those who voted for Yanukovich’s party are satisfied with democracy and trust in legal system more in South-Eastern part (still there is no significant results supporting the higher level of satisfaction among all persons from this mega-region). Also we found the lower level of political activity among Yanukovich supporters. Especially on Western and Central regions in comparison with Eastern (but not the Southern)

There is no strong and robust effect of poverty (belonging to the deepest quantile group) on the dependent variables, but in the South-Eastern regions (especially as further analysis demonstrates in Eastern regions) poor persons are more politically active. In central regions poor are less satisfied with democracy (as well as the whole population) and trust in political system. In Southern regions poor trust less to politicians and legal system (the reasons for Communist party support).

If we observe the variables responsible for the discrepancies on the macrolevel we will find the following results. There is no difference between Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian regions (as it was mentioned), regions with older and younger population, higher and lower salary regions, with higher and lower unemployment. Rural regions are a bit more politically active; also Yanukovich supporting regions are more satisfied with political situation a bit more with democracy and trust less in the legal system.

References

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