I would like to thank Jessica Pisano for an astute review of Party Politics in Russia and Ukraine. Since, as Pisano notes, the book was published in the shadow of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I would like to elaborate on the case selection. Although the decision to compare party politics and electoral system changes in Russia and Ukraine was made well before Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, I was mindful of the Kremlin’s rhetoric on Ukraine while writing. For example, endnote 11 in chapter 1 submits that “placing too much emphasis on [the two countries’] shared experiences risks sounding like Russian politicians, including President Putin, who discount Ukraine’s independence and statehood” (p. 232). The note also discusses both Ukrainian demands for autonomy as the Russian Empire disintegrated and the challenges that Ukraine’s national movement posed to the Communist Party. The body of the work, meanwhile, focuses on post-Soviet differences, such as cross-national variation in presidential turnover and the evolution of the two countries’ national identities (pp. 15–16). With such differences in mind, I acknowledge that some scholars may doubt whether politics in Russia and Ukraine can be meaningfully compared. I also assert, however, that for certain, well-specified questions “there are not only enough similarities but also enough meaningful differences to make a comparison of Russia and Ukraine intellectually fruitful” (p. 16)—with the caveat that the conditions facilitating the comparisons that interested me “were temporary due to the countries’ evolving regimes” (p. 28).
Setting aside the question of case selection, Pisano raises two important issues: Russia’s influence in Ukraine’s domestic politics and the role of informal politics in candidate selection. Given that one goal of the book is to assess the impact of diverging regime trajectories on how parties navigate major electoral system changes, the possibility of cross-border diffusion raises the question of whether the behaviors of Ukrainian parties and politicians accurately reflect what one might expect in the absence of potential meddling from an increasingly authoritarian neighbor. This is a fair point. However, if Russian influence led Ukrainian parties and politicians to behave more like Russian parties and politicians, its influence should have made the cross-national differences uncovered in the book less likely, not more.
Finally, the decision to limit the analysis to incumbent legislators was made to increase comparability and to focus on politicians more squarely situated in the formal corridors of power. Future work could certainly combine quantitative interparty analyses of candidate selection and cross-national responses to electoral system changes with a qualitative approach relying on more idiographic explanations. In addition to using widely available data to draw meaningful inferences across parties and regime types, the book’s analyses of candidate selection, culminating in chapter 5, offer a potential model for identifying nominations that defy conventional explanations and would be worthy of closer inspection.
