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Market Democracy Unleashed? Business Elites and the Crisis of Competitive Authoritarianism in Ukraine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

John A. Gould  and
Yaroslav Hetman
John A. Gould
Affiliation:
Colorado College
Yaroslav Hetman
Affiliation:
El Pomar Foundation
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Abstract

This paper examines the political economy of the Orange Revolution in an effort to understand routes by which less democratic postcommunist countries might break with an illiberal status quo. The fusion of Ukraine's rent-seeking economic interests and illiberal political regime produced an unstable equilibrium that is poorly explained by two leading theoretical frameworks: ‘market reform’ and ‘political competition’ theory. Only by combining key insights from each do we get a full explanation of the pressures that generated Ukraine's challenge to illiberalism in 2004. We examine this story with a particular focus on the crisis-prone nature of ‘competitive authoritarian regimes’ and the related strategic calculations of business elites.

Keywords

UkraineOrange RevolutionYushchenkoYanukovychauthoritarianismdemocracyeconomic reformoligarchsprivatization
Type
Article
Information
Business and Politics , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , August 2008 , pp. 1 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © V.K. Aggarwal 2008 and published under exclusive license to Cambridge University Press 

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