Decentralization and Multilevel Elections in Ukraine E-Book

Valentyna Romanova

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 290

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The post-2014 decentralization policy is consolidating the center-periphery relations in Ukraine. Already before 2014, domestic policymakers had been drafting proposals for local amalgamation and an increase of regional authority. Before the 2020 watershed subnational elections, only the local amalgamation policy was completed, however. A significant repercussion of the post-2014 decentralization reform has been a sharp decrease in congruence of the shares of competing national parties in the parliamentary, regional, and municipal electoral arenas. On the other hand, the party system has, at the municipal level, become less fragmented. Regional councils have, in contrast, remained highly fragmented. The outcomes of the indirect elections of regional councils’ heads have benefitted Ukraine’s ruling party. Methodologically, the book illustrates the added value of investigating elections from a multilevel perspective. It contributes to the comparative exploration of party systems change over time, and constitutes a case study of more general patterns of interaction between municipal decentralization and political development in democratizing states.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Foreword

Endorsements

Introduction

1 The Rise of Local Authority

Policy Learning

Policy Change

2 No Rise of Regional Authority

Policy Learning

(Attempts at) Policy Change

3 The Dynamics of Regionalized Party Competition

4 Multilevel Elections’ Incongruence and Decentralization

5 Multilevel Competition and Decentralization

6 The Aftermath of Regional Contests The Indirect Elections of Regional Council Heads

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix

Endorsements (full)

Appendix

Table A1. Dissimilarity indices: the congruence of parliamentary and municipal contests in the 2010/2012 multilevel elections.

Table A2. Dissimilarity indices: the congruence of parliamentary and regional contests in the 2010/2012 multilevel elections.

Table A3. Dissimilarity indices: the congruence of parliamentary and municipal contests in the 2014/2015 multilevel elections.

Table A4. Dissimilarity indices: the congruence of parliamentary and regional contests in the 2014/2015 multilevel elections.

Table A5. Dissimilarity indices: the congruence of parliamentary and municipal contests in the 2019/2020 multilevel elections.

Table A6. Dissimilarity indices: the congruence of parliamentary and regional contests in the 2019/2020 multilevel elections.

Table A7. Parties-frontrunners in the three multilevel elections studied.

Foreword

This monograph is a result of Dr. Valentyna Romanova’s many years’ research on Ukraine’s subnational politics and elections. After earning a PhD degree at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy University, she spent four years at the University of Edinburgh to study and teach political science. After returning to Ukraine, she launched her career at the National Institute for Strategic Studies subordinated to the Administration of the President of Ukraine and served three presidents (Viktor Yanukovych, Petro Poroshenko, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy), with an interval when she worked at a private think-tank in Kyiv. Romanova’s experience at the president’s policy-making institute gave her a chance to observe Ukraine’s decentralization reform from within.

As one of the editors of Regional and Federal Studies, Romanova gained affluent expertise in subnational politics in post-communist and even other regions of the world. This expertise allows her to exploit an institutionalist approach to analyzing Ukraine’s decentralization reform and subnational elections in the light of elites’ intentions and alliances. Simultaneously, this book discloses an unknown aspect of Ukraine’s political history in this century.

The readers may think that Ukraine’s decentralization reform after the Euromaidan Revolution, which enlarged and strengthened basic local authorities and deprived regional (oblast) and district (raion) authorities of previous competences, was a phenomenon analogous to municipal reforms performed by Visehrad countries in the 1990s. In the latter cases, the reform coalition of central and local politicians abolished meso-level governments or transformed them into state organs, regarding them as bastions of conservative forces. It might also be possible to interpret the center-local coalition in Ukraine as an attempt to weaken regional identities exploitable by separatist forces. However, Romanova’s analysis based on the concept of the “advocacy coalition framework” casts doubt to these teleological interpretations. In post-Euromaidan Ukraine, policy-makers pursued both amalgamation of basic municipalities and municipalization of regions and districts, but only the former was blessed with the formation of an advocacy coalition.

Romanova traces the origin of Ukraine’s decentralization reform to Roman Bezsmertnyy’s project in 2005. In other words, four presidential administrations, from Viktor Yushchenko to Zelenskyy, harbored the idea of decentralization, irrespective of their geopolitical orientation. In my view, the early origin of amalgamation of municipal units is a natural result of Ukrainian reformers’ institutional choice in the 1990s. The Ukrainian Constitution of 1996 defined cities, towns, and villages as municipal units, while making regions and districts units for state administration and having their chief administrators appointed by the president. Thus emerged 10,961 small municipalities with average populations of about 1,500. The small scale of municipalities put their sustainability in question.

Ukraine’s bet on villages and towns as the basic unit of local self-government reminds us of Armenia’s experience. Independent Armenia not only betted on village soviets as the basic unit of local self-government, but even divided them (which used to be administrative villages in the Soviet era) into spontaneous settlements. In this way, approximately eight hundred municipalities materialized often with a population of a few hundred people in this small country. Moreover, in Armenia, provinces (marzer) only had representatives of the central government and never enjoyed the status of an upper tier of self-government.1

For both Armenia and Ukraine, amalgamation of municipalities was inevitable. In both countries, this process accelerated after the revolutions (in Ukraine in 2014 and Armenia in 2018) perhaps because the post-revolutionary leaders began to adopt new tactics to win elections, in contrast to the old elites’ endeavor to build a nationwide patronal hierarchy of electoral machines. In Armenia, the number of municipalities slowly shrank to about five hundred by 2017, but, after the April Revolution in 2018, it decreased to 79 in 2021, with about a twenty thousand population on average.2 As Romanova notes, the number of Ukraine’s municipalities decreased from 10,961 in 2014 to 1,469 in 2020. These enlarged municipalities had an average population of about 13,000. These scales of municipalities in Ukraine and Armenia remind us of raiony (districts) before Nikita Khrushchev’s policy of raion amalgamation in the early 1960s.

In contrast, Russian and Lithuanian state-builders counted on raiony as the basic unit of local self-government. The amended Russian Federal Law on the General Principles of Local Self-Government of 2003 made towns and villages the lower tier of local self-government, indeed with a chronical deficit of human and financial resources, while in Lithuania villages and towns were degraded to intra-municipal structures. Remarkably, when Lithuanian reformers designed the new system of local self-government in the 1990s, an option intended to divide the then existing 56 raiony and cities into about 90-120 smaller municipalities with average populations of twenty to thirty thousand. One of the possible criteria to demarcate these new raiony was the boundaries of pre-Khrushchev raiony.3 In the late 1990s, the then Conservative government established five new raiony to reverse its falling popularity, partly responding to the former raion central settlements’ desire to regain their previous status of which they had been deprived by Khrushchev’s amalgamation policy.4

Thus, we see the ghost of pre-Khrushchev raiony wandering in these countries despite the significant demographic changes there since the 1960s.

Another point Romanova makes is the incongruence of national, regional, and local (regional capital) elections. Conventional wisdom in political science regards significant incongruence between elections at various levels as a menace to the integrity of the state or normal functioning of federalism.5 Subnational elections held before national elections expose potential social trends and facilitate the formation of winning coalitions for the coming national elections, as often happens in Lithuania and Poland. Honeymoon voting6 is possible not only in parliamentary but also local elections held soon after presidential elections.

In contrast to these merits of electoral congruence for regime survival, Romanova describes inter-electoral incongruence in a positive light. A national ruling party might become the top runner at general elections in a region, but this might not be the case for the same region’s regional council and/or regional capital elections.

In my view, an example of the multilevel incongruences of election results beneficial for regime survival was those observed in Russian politics during the 1990s. In 1996, influential governors and ethnic republic presidents described themselves as defenders of local interests, struggling to minimize the negative influence of the erroneous reform policy adopted by the federal government on the local population. As a result, in a series of regions, pro-communist (anti-Yeltsin) voters in the presidential elections voted for their incumbent regional leaders appointed by or coalesced with President Boris Yeltsin in the gubernatorial elections. With hindsight, the multilevel electoral incongruence facilitated the defusing of the population’s social discontent and enabled consolidation of a post-communist patronal regime in Russia.

In the 2010-2012 electoral cycle in Ukraine, the vertical electoral incongruence was relatively insignificant since the Party of Regions won the presidential, subnational, and parliamentary elections in a number of regions. This means that Yanukovych had built a nationwide hierarchy of electoral machines with the exception of regions, which did not accept his regime for identity reasons.

In the 2014-2015 electoral cycle, despite the exodus of a significant portion of the pro-Russian vote from Ukraine’s electoral scene, the vertical electoral incongruence increased because Poroshenko’s party was forced to share the benefits of the Euromaidan Revolution with other parties. In addition, mayoral parties had already emerged in the 2015 local elections.

In the following period, Poroshenko could not build a nationwide electoral hierarchy indispensable for his reelection because there were neither national nor (statewide) subnational elections during 2016-2018. Moreover, in 2016-2018, the European Union requested Ukraine to adopt the “contest (konkurs) principle” in nomination of governor candidates and restricted the president’s prerogative to appoint governors at his discretion.

While Poroshenko’s electoral defeat in 2019 is explained by his failure in building a nationwide electoral machine, President Zelenskyy rejected it consciously in the 2019-2020 electoral cycle and soon chose to ally with growing mayoral parties. As is well known, conflicts took place between the president and mayors in coping with the pandemic of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, but, after mayoral parties’ victories in the local elections, they quickly adjusted their relations. In some regional councils, having lost their previous authority after the completion of local amalgamation, the presidential People’s Servant Party and mayoral parties made deals for gubernatorial appointment.

One of the driving forces of the development of mayoral parties in regions of post-Euromaidan Ukraine was to save the lifeline for the population (daily public administration) from polarizing and ideologizing national politics. This motivation met Zelenskyy’s desire. Moreover, perhaps Zelenskyy and his administration did not want to overwhelm themselves with detailed expertise for daily public administration. For the lack of desire to build a nationwide electoral machine and of expertise for providing the population with daily services, which characterizes such post-post-communist politicians as Zelenskyy and Nikol Pashinyan in Armenia, the completion of municipal amalgamation by the 2020 local elections and the alliance with pragmatist mayors after the elections would seem to be a rational choice. Yet the sustainability of this alliance over the head of weakened middle-level governments remains to be seen.

January 30, 2022

Kimitaka Matsuzato

Professor of Comparative Politics

Graduate School for Law and Politics

University of Tokyo

 

1 Kimitaka Matsuzato and Stepan Danielyan, “Faith or Tradition: The Armenian Apostolic Church and Community-Building in Armenia and Nagorny Karabakh,” Religion, State & Society 41, 1 (2013), p. 24.

2 Interview with Daniel Ioannisyan, advisor of the Government Committee on Constitutional Reform in Armenia, January 21, 2022, Yerevan.

3 My interview with Algirdas Astrauskas, advisor of the Committee on State Administration and Local Self-Government of the Lithuanian Parliament, February 23, 2018, Vilnius.

4 Kimitaka Matsuzato, “The Last Bastion of Unitarism? Local Institutions, Party Politics and Ramifications of EU Accession in Lithuania,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 43, 5 (2002), pp. 362-363.

5Peter Ordeshook, “Russia’s Party System: Is Russian Federalism Viable?,” Post-Soviet Affairs 12, 3 (1996), pp. 195-217.

6Matthew S. Shugart and John M. Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Chapter 11.

Endorsements

Valentyna Romanova provides a detailed analysis … a valuable book for those interested in Ukrainian politics.—Paul D’Anieri

A brilliant and detailed analysis. Based on deep and empirically sound research,this book is a must-read for all students of Ukraine and post-Soviet

politics.—Mikhail Minakov

Valentyna Romanova presents a rich study based on detailed understanding and years of research of local politics and elections in Ukraine. The book will be an invaluable resource for researchers of post-Soviet Ukrainian politics.— Paul Chaisty

Packed with insightful analysis and providing a longue durée outlook, Decentralization and Multilevel Elections in Ukraine is an indispensable read to understand the complexity of uprooting the Soviet legacy in governance. … profoundly interesting. —Orysia Lutsevych

This is a very sophisticated study of decentralization and multilevel elections in Ukraine. The study is very well grounded in theory and provides a wealth of new empirical data to back up its novel conclusions. … beautifully

crafted ... The book makes an important contribution to the field of territorial politics and democratisation in Ukraine, and also to the wider field of comparative studies and local politics.—Cameron Ross

This book provides students of Ukrainian politics with amazing and surprising insights into the peculiarities of local power.—Nicolas Hayoz

Romanova’s book on the most recent reforms in Ukraine is exemplary. The very careful and detailed study of current affairs in local and regional Ukraine makes this a must-read for students of Ukrainian politics.

—Ulrik Kjær

A meticulous analysis … strongly recommended for everybody interested in Ukrainian politics. —Kataryna Wolczuk

Introduction

When Ukraine’s government announced the start of the decentralization reform in April 2014, it planned to strengthen local governance by means of local amalgamation and to increase regional authority via the introduction of the executive committees of the directly elected councils. In advance of the 2020 substate elections, the government completed amalgamation and increased local authority over public service provision and local development all over the country. However, the directly elected regional councils have not yet gained the constitutional right to establish their executive committees. The centrally appointed heads of regional state administrations continue to wield executive powers in relation to both the state and regional councils.

This book addresses two puzzles. First, it seeks to explain why the reformers consolidated and empowered local governance, but have so far failed to strengthen the directly elected regional authorities. Second, it aims at explaining the implications of the decentralization policy on multilevel elections in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s official decentralization policy strategy—the Concept on Reforming Local Self-Government and the Territorial Organization of Power, approved by the government on 1 April 2014 (the 2014 Concept)1—outlined the ambition to strengthen local governance through the amalgamation of local communities and an increase in their financial and institutional stance. It also aimed at granting directly elected regional councils the constitutional right to establish their own executive committees. The latter task directly affects the responsibilities of the centrally appointed regional executives—the heads of regional state administration. Currently, they implement the decisions made by the respective regional councils, apart from executing the Center’s decisions at the substate level. Although the 2014 Concept outlined these objectives, it was not unusual for policymakers to make compromises when they proceeded to the decision-making stages. The question arises as to why the local amalgamation policy was implemented, but its regional authority equivalent has yet to materialize.

The literature on public policy analysis emphasizes the core role of agenda-setting and acknowledges the agenda-setting power of crises, elections, and government change. Research on the initiation of policy changes introduces the notion of focusing events—unexpected events that stimulate policymakers to focus on hitherto neglected salient issues (Graeme 2013). With respect to the post-2014 decentralization policy, the major focusing event that fostered the agenda-setting stage was a change in the status of the domestic political elites after the Euromaidan Uprising. The new ruling elites who came to power in 2014 expressed their eagerness to introduce decentralization policies. On 27 February 2014, the newly established government introduced the position of vice-prime minister responsible for decentralization. Volodymyr Hroysman, an erstwhile city mayor, was awarded the portfolios of Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Regional Development, Building, and Communal Service of Ukraine. During 2002-2006, he served in the Vinnytsia city council, and was subsequently mayor of Vinnytsia during 2006-2014. On 5 March 2014 Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk stated that decentralization would be a priority for the newly formed government: “[r]ights should be granted to regions” (Yatsenyuk 2014). On 1 April 2014, the government adopted a decentralization reform agenda (the 2014 Concept) followed by an action plan with a precise implementation schedule. On 13 April 2014 the acting president Oleksandr Turchynov issued a decree and instructed the Cabinet of Ministers to draft laws on decentralization, with an emphasis on empowering territorial communities and introducing regional council executive committees. President Petro Poroshenko, elected in May 2014, expressed enthusiasm for the decentralization reform outlined in the 2014 Concept. The parliamentary coalition, established soon after the October 2014 elections, voiced similar support in its coalition agreement.

The violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity in Crimea and Donbas did not stop central policymakers from initiating the decentralization reform. Maryna Rabinovych argues that “Ukraine’s [territorial integrity] crisis response strategy has been comprised by three key axes: security operations …; diplomatic efforts …; and domestic reforms, including inter alia the decentralization reform” (Rabinovych 2020: 5). The launch of the decentralization reform increased expectations that the “implementation of reforms may help to facilitate a de-escalation and peaceful settlement of the violent conflict in the Donbas region. Even if the reform is first implemented elsewhere in the country prior to a full cessation of the conflict in Donbas, Kyiv will be able to demonstrate to the people of Donbas that it is serious about reducing national state authorities and enhancing local authority. This would likely make the region’s acceptance of reintegration with the rest of the country easier as local people realize that being a part of Ukraine brings local empowerment and potentially more effective governance” (USAID 2014: 20). Anatoliy Tkachuk (2015) highlighted that the government approved the decentralization agenda before the outbreak of the armed conflict in Donbas; he warned that introducing the regional council executive committees before strengthening local governance and during Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine could be dangerous. Largely in agreement with this statement, Madoian has recently argued that “[s]uccessful conflict settlement is possible if Ukraine proceeds with a decentralisation process that shifts power from a regional to a community level” (Madoian 2020: 1).

Scholarship on local governance suggests three major reasons why policymakers introduce local amalgamation: (i) to improve the quality of public service delivery; (ii) to improve the efficiency of local self-government; (iii) to promote participatory democracy (Swianiewicz 2010; Ebinger et al 2019). Arguably, the core objective of local amalgamation in Ukraine has been to improve the ability of local self-governance to provide basic public services: to take responsibility for primary and secondary education, primary healthcare, the provision of administrative services, etc. Prior to the reform, Ukraine’s local governance was fragmented; the capacity of local self-government to manage allocated functions was limited (Hanushchak 2013; OECD 2014; Tkachuk 2017; OECD 2018; Zhalilo et al 2019; Shevchenko et al 2020). The quality of public services was deteriorating for decades. Under Soviet rule, the delivery of public services at the local level was often managed and funded by big state-owned enterprises (Leitch 2017: 1144). After the Soviet Union collapsed, many of these enterprises were either privatized or experienced financial hardship. In either case they took less care in the provision of public service at the local level. In these circumstances, local self-government was asked to take over social services previously provided by state companies, without any increase in resources (O’Connell and Wetzel 2003). “Local governments [were] supposed to provide basic social and administrative services: pre-school, primary, secondary, and technical-vocational education; preventive medicine and primary and secondary healthcare; keeping the public peace; the organization of residential service delivery, public transit, and so on” (Chumak and Shevliakov 2009: 6).

Despite the lack of funding, the number of local authorities—directly elected local councils—increased (Tkachuk 2017). That increase became possible in accord with the law on local governance (the Law “On Local Councils and Local & Regional Self-governance”) introduced on 7 December 1990, on the eve of Ukraine’s independence. In 1991 there were 9,211 local councils in Ukraine. By 2014, that number increased to 10,961 (Monitorynh protsesu detsentralizatsiyi vlady ta reformuvannya mistsevoho samovryaduvannya stanom na 10 veresnya 2020 roku 2020). With an average population of approximately 1,500 inhabitants, many local councils were afflicted with a low capacity to provide basic public services and to promote local development. In these circumstances, regional and subregional authorities assumed responsibility for public service delivery and received subsidies and transfers from the central budget for the purpose. The majority of the transfers were conditional (Ladner et al 2016); the centrally appointed regional executives administered the transfers to municipalities from the central budget, and “the regional budget would act as an intermediary between the state and the city budget when allocating subventions” (Martinez-Vazquez and Wayne 2011: 21, cited in Platonova 2020: 149). “Most health and social protection expenditures [took] place at [the oblast and rayon] levels” (O’Connell and Wetzel 2003: 358).

Even though the quality of public services in most localities deteriorated, there was one notable exception—the cities of oblast significance (Chumak and Shevliakov 2009: 6; OECD 2018). Their ability to perform their duties with respect to public service delivery largely resulted from the allocation of a considerable share of Personal Income Tax to their local budgets. In Ukraine, Personal Income Tax is often paid not on the basis of where taxpayers live, but where they are employed (Levitas and Djikic 2017: 52). Because major enterprises generating legal income are registered in the cities of oblast significance (Levitas and Djikic 2017: fn 9), the capacity of local governance in these cities was often sufficient to deliver basic public services to their inhabitants.

When Ukraine’s system of multilevel governance is considered as a whole, it becomes clear that “real problems have been caused by the fact that as local (self) governments the character of oblasts and rayons has always been compromised by the national government appointment of their governors” (Levitas and Djikic 2017: 4). This highlights the division of power between the elected authorities and the appointed governors—the matter that has been at the core of center-periphery relations in Ukraine since independence. As Kimitaka Matsuzato puts it: “[a] specific feature of the local reforms in Ukraine [has been] the status of regional and district authorities, which have been repeatedly municipalized in times of decentralization and stratified in times of centralization” (Matsuzato 2000: 45).

In the days of the Ukrainian SSR there were executive committees of the directly elected regional councils. In 1992, soon after gaining independence, Ukraine abolished these committees and introduced regional executives—presidential representatives. Presidential representatives were in charge of implementing the decisions of the president at the substate scales and for ensuring state oversight of decision-making in the directly elected councils. After two years, the national parliament abolished the regional executives and transferred their responsibilities to the elected regional and sub-regional councils, which had the right to establish executive committees. These shifts in regional authority were the outcome of attempts by the president and the parliament to advance their own authority in the Center (Matsuzato 2000).

A major policy change occurred in 1995-1996. The Constitutional Treaty and the Constitution made the executive committees of the directly elected regional councils into regional state administrations—regional executives—appointed and dismissed by the president (Wolczuk 2002). Since then, the directly elected regional councils have served as regional self-government bodies, while the appointed heads of the regional state administrations have acted as regional executives.2 Regional councils had power to declare no confidence in the head of the relevant state administration, on the basis of which the President of Ukraine had to make a decision. The state could take on the responsibility of the tasks assigned to local and (sub)regional self-government, and which were delegated to (sub)regional state administrations.3

Despite Ukraine having signed and ratified the European Charter of Local Self-government (1996 and 1997, respectively) and passed new domestic legislation on self-government (Law “On Local Self-government in Ukraine,” 1997), in practice, regional executives often concentrated substate power in their hands, often to the benefit of the ruling party in the Center (Matsuzato 2001). “These state-appointed heads [of regional and subregional state administrations], in turn, exert considerable influence over the hiring and firing of the directors of most local departments (e.g. Health, Education, Social Welfare). And both the heads of oblasts and rayons, and the departmental directors whose careers they control are subject to a dual subordination, at once responsible to higher level state (e.g. line ministries) and their democratically-elected councils. As a result, there is a profound confusion of local and national authority at the oblast and rayon levels” (Levitas and Djikic 2017: 14).

The 2004 constitutional reform, which introduced a parliamentary-presidential regime into Ukraine (Matsuzato 2005; Herron 2007; Kudelia 2007), considered center–periphery relations only in the context of power distribution in Kyiv (Romanova 2011a). In line with the reform, the heads of regional state administrations became responsible to the president and to the government (prior to 2004, they were responsible to the president alone), both accountable to and under the control of higher-level bodies of the executive branch (Article 118). The president was now granted the right to appoint the heads of (sub)regional state administrations in negotiation with the central government, a similar procedure existing for their dismissal. As early as 2010, the 2004 constitutional reform was annulled, only to be re-introduced again in 2014. These shifts of the provisions of the 2004 constitutional reform reflected changes in the division of power between central policymakers and did not affect regional councils’ powers.

In this book, I assess policymaking relating to the increase in local and regional authority with the help of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) of public policy analysis. The ACF interprets policymaking as a competition between two or more advocacy coalitions operating within a policy subsystem (Sabatier 1998). Advocacy coalitions comprise actors who share similar policy beliefs and coordinate their political actions “to achieve similar policy objectives” (Sabatier & Weible 2007: 196). Although some policy beliefs can change over time, core policy beliefs change very slowly and are associated with normative values. The ACF assumes that actors who seek to translate their beliefs into policy actions join coalitions of allies and confront opponents in order to succeed. Sharing beliefs is a minimal condition for actors to qualify as a coalition, whereas true advocacy coalitions also coordinate their actions (Graeme 2013). Simply put, policy changes often result from the success of a more powerful advocacy coalition. The ACF is particularly useful for analyzing policymaking in times of uncertainty and when there are numerous actors. In addition, it emphasizes the role of expert inputs in policymaking without necessarily prioritizing party politics. Finally, the ACF is crucial for public policy analysis over an extended period. This framework helps me to explain why the pro-reform advocacy coalition was able to implement the policy of local amalgamation, despite internal divisions and inconsistent coordination efforts, while the alternate advocacy coalition succeeded in postponing decision-making regarding the introduction of executive committees into regional councils.

There are two approaches to understanding the legacy of the 2014 decentralization reform in Ukraine. On the one hand, Anatoliy Tkachuk, a senior advisor to the government that approved the 2014 Concept, repeatedly stressed that the Concept “was prepared in 2008-2009 and was first approved in July 2009, when Yulia Tymoshenko served as prime minister” (Tkachuk 2015) and that the post-2014 decentralization reform was implemented according to the outlines drawn up in “2008-2009 … [when] the main law drafts were prepared: on the right of territorial communities to amalgamate, on the administrative-territorial structure [of Ukraine] … If we compare the approved [amalgamated territorial] communities and districts as of 2020, they do not differ much from the ones that were drafted in 2008-2009” (Tkachuk 2020). On the other hand, international experts, familiar with the government’s policy documents on decentralization, drafted in 2005-2006 and in 2008-2009, claim that the post-2014 decentralization reform is based on the policy recommendations first drafted in 2005 (e.g. USAID 2014).

I reconstruct the Concept of Administrative-Territorial Reform, drafted by the government in 2005, using the detailed feedback report of the Council of Europe, prepared for the Ukrainian government. The Concept of Local Government Reform, prepared by the government in 2009, is available in a valuable secondary source (Aleksandrova and Koliushko 2011). Apart from these two policy documents, I examine the draft of the Concept of Reforming Local Self-government and the Territorial Organization of Power prepared by the government in 2012-2013. When analyzing and comparing these and some other policy documents, I refer to the corresponding Council of Europe feedback reports.4

When comparing the government’s policy documents on decentralization drafted before and after the launch of the 2014 decentralization reform, I identify the extent to which policymakers specified the policy objectives of local amalgamation and the increase of regional authority, how policymakers aimed at achieving those goals, and the extent to which they proceeded towards decision-making and implementation. The comparative analysis of subsequent government policy recommendations on decentralization helps to clarify the input of various actors into the aggregation of the pro-reform advocacy coalition and its opponents since 2005.

I find an unexpected continuity in efforts at domestic policy learning throughout 2005-2014, with little—if any—interruption. This continuity had little to do with party politics as manifested in elections. The policy learning efforts consisted in collecting and analyzing the data necessary to design potential local amalgamation scenarios, as well as for drafting laws, i.e. on local amalgamation, and receiving feedback on those drafts from domestic and international experts, including Council of Europe experts. When the core data-driven policy documents were drafted by the government, policymakers interacted with substate authorities (at the stage of data collection) and domestic think tanks (at the stage of data analysis). Such efforts did not compare with the scope of more recent, post-2014 public consultations or with the new scope of expert engagement, but they helped to generate policy recommendations for local amalgamation based on data collected by substate authorities all over Ukraine, which were passed on to government policy analysists for further data analysis. Those policy learning efforts helped to engage actors into the emerging advocacy coalition in favor of decentralization policies. I suggest that this long and drawn out policy learning made it possible for the ruling elites—those who came to power in 2014 and possessed the political will to bring about policy change—to finally launch decentralization reform.

When it comes to local amalgamation, the pro-reform advocacy coalition incorporated actors with extensive experience of policy learning in previous governments. The policymakers possessed the political will to take on board their policy recommendations, enhanced by professional feedback from the Council of Europe. The pro-reform advocacy coalition’s activities were facilitated by well-coordinated and increased international support. It is difficult to overvalue the input of enhanced international support for the post-2014 decentralization reform, namely in identifying the shortcomings of policy implementation at the local level and in engaging the government and diverse stakeholders in policy discussions in order to make the necessary adjustments. This input limited the ability of the opponents of local amalgamation to present the government’s policy as harmful.

It is doubtless challenging to introduce policy changes that require constitutional amendments and it was dangerous to introduce executive committees into regional councils in the midst of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine. In this book, I highlight other factors that account for the delay in increasing regional authority in Ukraine.

In contrast to local amalgamation policy, the policy learning experience relating to the growth of regional authority was less specific. Domestic policymakers have mostly disputed either (i) increasing vs. limiting regional authority, or (ii) regional authorities’ subordination to the president, the parliament, or the government. Prior to 2014, domestic policymakers drafted many laws regarding constitutional amendments containing brief clauses about regional council executive committees, but there was no consensus on how to ensure the lack of overlap between the potential executive duties of regional self-governance and the executive duties of the state. This gap in policy learning had severe implications, because the “blurred” division of responsibilities between substate authorities and the input of regional governors into the system of multilevel governance constituted the major crux of center-periphery relations in Ukraine. In Summer 2014, Summer 2015, and Winter 2019-2020, central policymakers attempted to foster constitutional changes related to increasing regional authority, but there was no consensus on the division of responsibilities between the Center, regional governors, and substate councils.

Moreover, in advance of the 2020 substate elections, the pro-reform advocacy coalition failed to address the criticisms of the alternate advocacy coalition. The latter’s members were to be found not only in parliament. The alternative coalition was strengthened after incorporating local authorities who effectively opposed the policy recommendation to introduce state supervision over both delegated and own responsibilities of local self-government. The capacity of local authorities to engage in debates on matters of regional authority is striking. For their part, regional councils did not actively call for an increase of their powers.

As with the policy of local amalgamation, the post-2014 policy recommendations related to increasing regional authority had little to do with party politics. The strongest party, whose manifesto declared its commitment to increasing regional authority via introducing executive committees into the directly elected councils, was a loser in the Euromaidan Uprising. The political parties that opposed president Viktor Yanukovych during the Euromaidan Uprising did not present decentralization as a major demand. Although their manifestos contained declarations of their commitment to strengthening local self-governance, those declarations lacked concrete policy recommendations, apart from generic references to the European Charter of Local Self-Government.

The second puzzle that this book addresses relates to the implications of decentralizationon multilevel elections in Ukraine.

Mierzejewski-Voznyak (forthcoming) warns that Ukraine’s party politics could get “localized” during the implementation of the decentralization policy. Before the 2015 substate contests, it was clear that “the newly elected regional and local councils won’t necessarily follow the lines of party competition in the current national parliament” (Romanova 2015a). As soon as the electoral outcomes were known, Andrew Wilson questioned the validity of interpreting them according to “the classic trope of a Ukraine-still-divided-between-west-and-east … The Brownian motion of Ukrainian politics means there are too many new forces in Ukraine.” (Wilson 2015). The decline of parliamentary parties’ representation in the substate councils elected in 2015 made Rozumnyi and Pavlenko conclude that a “crisis of parliamentary parties” (Rozumnyi and Pavlenko 2015: 5) had occurred. In contrast, the Razumkov Centre finds a “sufficient stability of [electoral] support of parties that belong to the [parliamentary] coalition in all regions [of Ukraine]” (Razumkov Centre 2016: 15).

In advance of the 2020 contests,