Critical election or frozen cleavages? How voters chose parties in the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election

How challenger parties can win big with frozen cleavages: Explaining the landslide victory of the Servant of the People party in the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary elections

“…In the Ukrainian parliamentary election of July 2019, Servant of the People (SN), the new party of Ukraine's recently elected outsider president, Volodymyr Zelensky, won a majority of seats and 43% of the popular vote. This result was unprecedented in post-Communist Ukrainian politics, and occurred against a background of what we (Chaisty and Whitefield, 2018) have evidenced as a 'frozen cleavage' in party competition. Frozen cleavages ought to make some strategies of new entry parties more difficult.…”

“…Issues like SN's pledge to end the moratorium on agricultural land privatisation, for instance, had the potential to open up a new cleavage. However, as our previous research has shown (Chaisty and Whitefield, 2018), there are good theoretical reasons to expect otherwise. Notwithstanding the inchoate nature of the Ukrainian party system since 1991, significant shifts in the supply of parties in Ukraine has proven quite compatible with stable underlying frozen cleavages, a finding supported by other work on post-Communist systems (Rovny and Polk, 2018).…”

“…We replicate the research design of the analysis of previous Ukrainian elections in 1994, 1998, 2007 and 2014 (Chaisty and Whitefield, 2018) to assess both the cleavage transforming and centrist strategies. Our dependent variable, the party preferences of respondents, is measured by the question ‘Which party did you vote for in the elections to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on 21 July 2019?’ The distribution of the support for those parties voted for by 20 or more respondents is summarised in Table 1.…”

“…Our explanatory attitudinal variables focus on aspects of the geo-cultural dimension of voting that predominated in the analysis of parliamentary elections before 2019 (e.g. Birch, 2000; Chaisty and Whitefield, 2018; Clem and Craumer, 2008; Herron, 2014). They cover ideological views of citizens towards the Soviet past and independence, and relations between Ukraine and the West (EU): 6 ‘The dissolution of USSR was a good thing’ 7 ‘Ukraine should integrate as far as possible with the European Union’ OR ‘Ukraine should remain isolated as far as possible from the European Union’ 8 …”

“…We are sceptical about this possibility. Stances on established cleavages are ordinarily sticky, particularly when as in the case of Ukraine voters’ views are rooted in identities and social locations, such as region, ethnicity and language (Chaisty and Whitefield, 2018; Rovny and Polk, 2018). Without this compositional shift, a centrist strategy would be unable to win big.…”