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The 1999 Ukrainian Presidential Election: Personalities, Ideology, Partisanship, and the Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Abstract

The 1999 Ukrainian presidential election took place during a period of extreme political turmoil. The excitement of democracy had waned, the economy spiraled ever downward, and charges of corruption among the administration seemed the harbinger of communist victory. Nevertheless, Ukrainian voters returned Leonid Kuchma to the helm. Thomas F. Klobucar, Arthur H. Miller, and Gwyn Erb investigate this curious result, using a model that combines economic evaluations, the candidates’ personalities, and ideology. Relatively well-developed partisanship is present in Ukraine and was a major influence on voters’ choice. Surprisingly, economic evaluations had little impact on the Ukrainian vote. Instead, party identification, ideology, and leadership trait assessments led Ukrainians to vote for the “democrat.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2002

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References

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2 Election results from the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Ukraine. Some agencies have reported irregularities in the 1999 election, but according to the U. S. Department of State, Country Report on Human Rights Practices: Ukraine (Washington, D.C., 2000), “almost all observers agreed that the election results reflected the will of the electorate“ (1). It is possible that the CEC results do not reflect the exact percentages of votes cast by the Ukrainian population. However, 63 percent of our respondents reported voting for Kuchma, 32 percent for Symonenko, and 4 percent against all. The official CEC results are 56 percent for Kuchma, 38 percent for Symonenko, and 3.4 percent against all. Allowing for postelection identification with the winner, the CEC results appear quite reasonable, despite allegations of vote fraud.

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20 This measure, however, is quite strongly related to geography. Western Ukrainians were far more likely to feel proud of the flag (Pearson’s r = .29). In addition, those in the western part of the country were also more likely to vote for Kuchma (Pearson’s r =.26). Nonetheless, election results indicated that even in eastern oblasts where Symonenko managed to win, he did so by very narrow margins.

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23 We hypothesize that these centrists are probably leaners, because few of them adopted centrist positions on the issue scales addressed in the following analysis.

24 In making this calculation, we followed Page, Benjamin I. and Jones, Calvin C., “Reciprocal Effects of Policy Preferences, Party Loyalties, and the Vote,American PoliticalScience Review 73, no. 4 (December 1979): 1071–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We subtracted respondents’ selfplacement on the communist-democrat scale from their placement of Kuchma and Symonenko on the same measure. The resulting distance measures (one for Kuchma, one for Symonenko) range from 0 to 6 (using absolute values for the differences obtained) where 0 means that respondents place the candidate and themselves at exactly the same place on the communist-democrat scale and 6 indicates that respondents place themselves and the candidate at opposite extremes on this continuum. Respondents were not asked to place Symonenko on the left-right scale, so we only have distance measures for Kuchma on this continuum. Both candidates, however, were placed on the communist-democrat scale.

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28 For a complete discussion of these conflict axes, see Miller and Klobucar, “The Development of Party Identification in Post-Soviet Societies.“

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30 We chose to use Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis here for two reasons. First, we use a trichotomized dependent variable that includes those who voted “against all” as the middle category. We felt that it was important to retain these voters in the analysis along with those who voted for Kuchma and Symonenko. Second, we feel that OLS results are more easily understood by a greater number of readers. Logistic regression results, using a dichotomized dependent variable, are equally persuasive, yielding a Cox and Snell R2 of .59 and predicting the correct vote for 95 percent of Kuchma’s voters and 85 percent of Symonenko’s voters (for an overall correct prediction rate of 91 percent). Those variables that are statistically significant predictors of the Kuchma vote in table 10, model 4 are also significant, with the same relative strength, in our logistic model.

31 Miller and Klobucar, “The Development of Party Identification in Post-Soviet Societies“; Miller, Arthur H., Klobucar, Thomas F., and Reisinger, William M., “Establishing Representation: Mass and Elite Political Attitudes in Ukraine,” in Wolchik, Sharon L. and Zviglyanich, Volodymyr, eds., Ukraine: The Search for a National Identity (Lanham, Md., 1999), 213–35Google Scholar; Grigory Nemiria, “Regionalism: An Underestimated Dimension of State-Building,“ in Wolchik and Zviglyanich, eds., Ukraine, 183-97; and Bojcun, “The Ukrainian Parliamentary Election in March-April 1994.“

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