Scholars studying Ukraine and Russia from a western perspective sometimes look for things that exist in the western political context and see how they operate in the post-Soviet context. This book focuses on political parties. The American founding fathers were not enthusiastic about parties, but knew that they would inevitably shape political life in the new world and resigned themselves to them. Russia and Ukraine certainly have parties, but in the wake of the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union they are not strong players in the political system and do not shape the way things work. In Russia, the main party is United Russia, the party of power nominally associated with President Vladimir Putin. Putin is now a personalistic dictator, however, and he does not rely on the party for much that he cannot find through other institutions. In Ukraine, which functions much more like a democracy, parties tend to be associated with one or another politician and typically rise and fall along with the influence of those individuals. Several of the parties are even conveniently named after their patrons, ensuring transparency. In addition, many candidates preferred to remain independent rather than join any party with the hope of maintaining some autonomy from the country's leaders.
Against this history, Byron Moraski's book investigates “how electoral systems affect the relationship between specific parties and individual legislators, with a particular emphasis on their implications for party development and party discipline” (5). This work aims to fill a gap in the literature because “we still know fairly little about when and why authoritarian regimes alter the electoral system governing their legislatures” (7). The central argument of the work is that “the adoption of closed-list PR systems in Russia and Ukraine was a critical opportunity to develop greater party institutionalization, regardless of regime trajectory, because the new rules dramatically altered the politics of candidate selection by giving parties monopoly control over who could run for legislative office” (9). In both countries, politicians replaced mixed-member systems with closed-list proportional representation systems that elected all representatives in a single national district. The author argues that control over candidate nominations is a first step toward party institutionalization.
The analysis pairs Russia and Ukraine because of their similarities and differences. The main similarity is that the choice makes it possible to control “for historical and cultural legacies” given that both countries were part of the Soviet Union for 70 years (14). Since then, however, their paths have diverged as Ukraine has seen much more frequent presidential turnover, with seven different presidents through Volodymyr Zelensky, than Russia, where hand-picked successors follow each other (15). The Kremlin adopted electoral reform for the 2007 State Duma elections in order to gain greater control over Russia's elections in the run-up to the 2008 presidential elections and reduce the chance that Putin would face any surprises in the country's parliament. Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma followed the Russian example because he was similarly worried about his ability to control the 2004 elections in the face of his sagging popularity ratings.
The book examines the impact of these reforms. Independently minded district deputies were the target of the reforms in both countries (25). Detailed chapters looking into these questions show that United Russia remained loyal to its own candidates, but also often nominated district deputies, seeking to coopt politicians who had developed politically useful local ties. Although Ukraine had a more complex party system and was less likely to nominate district deputies, the results were similar in that “parties may use the move to PR rules to develop greater party organization by investing in candidates with existing ties to specific geographically defined constituencies” (27). Ultimately, Russia and Ukraine ended their experiments with PR-only rules; Russia's authoritarian system now has more stable parties, while parties remain inchoate in Ukraine's more democratic system.
This is a richly detailed analysis that will be of great value to scholars who are deeply interested in the electoral politics of the developing political systems in Russia and Ukraine. The value added is in the examination of the institutional minutiae and its consequences, particularly the point that “political institutions and electoral rules are reflections of how power is configured at the time they are implemented” (213).
