Dr Sarah Whitmore

In the last decade the term culture war has become hard to avoid. If it is not yet the buzzword of the first part of the twenty-first century, it soon will be. Culture wars seem to be around us everywhere. Each passing week brings some new mention of an outbreak in a public institution, civic space or political arena in some part of the globe. Culture wars are the phenomenon we cannot seem to shake. Battle lines are drawn, rhetorical tools are sharpened and social media awash with vitriol and moralising, and seemingly unbridgeable social gaps. If the immediate post-Cold War period did usher in an era of universal global liberalism, decades on it is now far in the distance, only visible in the rear-view mirror. Instead, around us lie social and political fault lines featuring competing visions of what should be the appropriate normative basis upon which societies should be constituted. They are debates that focus on belonging, on citizenship, on rights and identities.

This research departs from conventional studies of citizen’s attitudes to parliament by utilising focus groups to interrogate the incredibly low levels of trust in Ukraine’s parliament during the Yanukovych and Poroshenko presidencies and explores how far they are related to the exceptionally high levels of disruptive protest in the chamber. Low trust is shaped primarily by citizens’ concerns about corruption, particularly the role of FIGs and of deputies’ rapacious and lawless behaviour (bezpredel). Disruptive protests were largely seen as inauthentic. Low trust was accompanied by support for democracy. 

Vladimir Putin’s United Russia and Nursultan Nazabayev’s Nur Otan represent a distinctive

type of dominant party due to their personalist nature and dependence on their presidential 

patrons. Such personalism deprives these parties of the agency to perform key roles in 

authoritarian reproduction typically expected of dominant parties, such as resource 

distribution, policy-making and mobilising mass support for the regime. Instead United 

Russia and Nur Otan have contributed to authoritarian consolidation by securing the 

president’s legislative agenda, stabilising elites to ensure their patron’s hold on power and 

assisting in perpetuating a discourse around the national leader. However, because these 

parties lack the agency to reproduce themselves, to entrench their position and to play more 

than a supportive role in regime consolidation the life-span of such personalist dominant 

parties is likely to be significantly shorter than that of dominant parties.

Conceptualising Russia as a neopatrimonial state directs attention to the patrimonial relations that pervaded formal institutions to reveal increasing tensions within the state during Putin's presidency. A case study of parliamentary oversight practices points to the emergence of legitimation as their key purpose, but also to the growing contradictions between the controlling and legitimating impulses of Putin's regime. At the same time deputies responded to the changes in their status and influence by moving their resources towards the patrimonial sphere, most notably utilising oversight institutions for direct and indirect private interests-”activities tolerated by the regime in exchange for political loyalty.

This study focuses on the impact of parliamentary parties on committees' structure and activity in the post-Soviet context. Through a case study of committees in Ukraine's Rada, the paper demonstrates that weak, fluid parties can act as a barrier to committees' efficacy by shaping their structure, leadership and by blocking ameliorating reforms. Although Ukraine's committees were formally allocated a significant role in the law-making process, in practice the realisation of this function was constrained by parties and also by context of the wider institutional uncertainty.

The institutionalization of factions in Ukraine’s parliament has proceeded in a patchy, uneven manner as a consequence of cross-cutting incentives created by the Constitution, lower order rules and the actions of the president. Although factions became more organizationally complex and disciplined, membership instability significantly undermined these developments so that factions remained weakly institutionalized. Despite this, factions came to exercise greater influence over the parliamentary leadership and the legislative process, largely thanks to the formation of Ukraine’s first parliamentary majority in 2000. However, as this majority was orchestrated by President Kuchma, Ukraine’s parliament remained vulnerable to external pressure.