In this original and well-researched book, Vasili Rukhadze explores why some governments that come to power after a popular uprising against an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regime survive, while others collapse. He compares three cases that share the same legacies insofar as they are successor states of the former Soviet Union: Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine. He argues that the survival of post-uprising governments depends on the size and cohesion of the coalition of political forces that constitute them, and that these are not necessarily the same factors that determined the survival of the non-democratic governments that preceded them.
Specifically, Rukhadze argues that a post-uprising government that consists of a small, cohesive coalition is more likely to survive than a large, fragmented coalition. This is because the nature of the coalition sets in motion three key causal mechanisms that fortify or undermine the new government: whether or not there is an active opposition, whether the constitutional question of the extent of executive (presidential) power is settled rapidly, and whether the reforms that the new governments propose succeed in rebuilding state capacity. Small, cohesive coalitions, the author argues, are unlikely to yield the kind of high-profile defections that provide a rallying point for anti-government protests, and as a result the opposition is likely to remain politically dormant for longer. Moreover, such coalitions find it easier to resolve constitutional issues at the outset and are able to agree rapidly on a set of reforms that restore state authority, undercut corruption, and maintain public confidence. Large fragmented coalitions, on the other hand, are likely to be plagued by defections to a burgeoning opposition, fail to resolve the issue of presidential power and fail to deliver meaningful reforms.
The author illustrates his argument by carefully examining the coalition of forces that came to power after the so-called “colored revolutions” in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine in 2003–2005. The new Kyrgyz and Ukrainian governments, he explains, consisted of a large number of political parties (sixteen in the case of Ukraine and thirteen in the case of Kyrgyzstan) with widely different ideologies. These coalitions began to fracture from the outset, as key leaders and parties quit the government and went into opposition. In Ukraine, the new president, Viktor Yushchenko, had been forced to yield many of his presidential powers even before he became president, as a result of pressure both from the outgoing administration of President Leonid Kuchma and from parts of his own coalition. However, this did not prevent an invigorated opposition from further undermining presidential authority once it had achieved a majority in parliament. In Kyrgyzstan, although President Kurmanbek Bakiyev enjoyed sweeping powers, these were ever more challenged by a strong opposition. Finally, in neither country could the main political forces agree on a set of reforms. As a result, public confidence in both governments collapsed. Both countries’ presidents remained in power for just five years; Yushchenko was defeated in presidential elections in 2010, while Bakiyev was removed in a violent uprising the same year.
In Georgia, by contrast, only five parties formed part of the winning coalition, of these three were minor players and the two main coalition partners, President Mikheil Saakashvili's National Movement and Zurab Zhvania's United Democrats, united to form a single party in early 2004. As a result, few key players defected to the opposition, leaving it dormant for several years. All coalition partners agreed on granting extensive authority to the president, effectively taking the issue of presidential power off the table. The coalition was able to enact far-reaching reforms, tackle corruption and restore the authority of the state. This allowed Saakashvili to win the 2008 elections and see out his two presidential terms.
While the overall argument of the book is convincing, I would question the author's assumption that the fragmentation that undermined the Ukrainian and Kyrgyz governments was due to ideological diversity. Rukhadze tends to label the coalition partners in each country as “left” or “right” without fully interrogating what these terms mean in their contexts. Despite the fact that he laments that “political scientists who study post-Color Revolution Ukraine have completely overlooked the role of [business elites]” (60), he himself does not consider the possibility that the fragmentation he identifies is a result of conflict between competing oligarchic interests or “clans,” rather than between rival ideologies.
Despite this, the book offers and interesting and convincing account of why some post-uprising governments survived, while others failed.
