Thursday, 11 May 2017 at 14:15 Aleksanteri Institute, Unioninkatu 33, Meeting room 2nd floor
Professor Oleksandr Fisun
Informal Politics and Neopatrimonial Democracy After
Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution
ABSTRACT:
What has changed and what has remained the same in Ukrainian politics after the Euromaidan
revolution and the collapse of Viktor Yanukovych’s regime in February 2014? Although new
democratic elites came to power immediately after the Euromaidan, informal institutions continued to
dominate the formal ones, and patron-client ties, personal loyalty, and clan “membership” persisted
as organizing principles of the system. These patrimonial principles determine the formation of
political parties, the majority of appointments to public office, and relations among political players at
the national and regional levels. As a result, the political regime that emerged following the
Euromaidan may be defined as a neopatrimonial democracy, in which multiple patron-client
oligarchic networks compete through formal electoral mechanisms, but the primary focus is still on
capturing positions to control sources of rents. Surprisingly, however, Ukraine’s patrimonial politics
are, in a paradoxical fashion, contributing to the institutionalization of political pluralism and political
competition via a series of formal and informal power-sharing arrangements between the major
Euromaidan players. Thus, the new Ukraine’s political system creates strong formal and informal
obstacles to the development of a super-presidential regime and transition to personal rule (mainly
through the divided premier-presidential system and the continued role of patronage networks in the
national and regional power-sharing arrangements). These formal and informal conditions also
hinder the state’s capture by representatives of a single oligarchic group and the monopolization of
political space at national and regional levels by a single political-economic clan.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:
Oleksandr Fisun is Professor of Political Science and Department Head at the V.N. Karazin Kharkiv
National University in Ukraine. His primary research interests are comparative politics and
democratic theory. He has held visiting fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute
(Washington DC), the National Endowment for Democracy, (Washington DC), The Centre for
European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto, and the Ellison Center for
Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington (Seattle). He has
published Democracy, Neopatrimonialism, and Global Transformations (Kharkiv, 2006), as well as
numerous book chapters and articles on comparative democratization, neopatrimonialism, regime
change in post-Soviet Eurasia, and Ukrainian politics. Areas of expertise: Democratization, Informal
Politics, Hybrid Regimes, Ukraine.
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www.helsinki.fi/aleksanteri/english/fellowship