We will discuss:

This thesis aims at explaining, why local governments in a hybrid political regime, such as Ukraine, adopt institutional mechanisms with varying opportunities for citizen participation. To fully understand the incentives of local governments to open towards citizens, it is not enough to account for such commonly referred conditions as political culture and civil society mobilization, autonomy and resources of local governments, as well as democracy promotion by international donors. 
It is also necessary to account for a peculiar logic of interactions among local economic and political elites in the production of institutions in a hybrid political regime, in which “individuals organize their political and economic pursuits primarily around the personalized exchange of concrete rewards and punishments” (Hale, 2015, pp. 9, 20).
The theoretical framework of this thesis understands the variation in opportunities for citizen participation as a product of institutional choices of local politicians who aim at maximizing their resources and relevance in local patronal politics. The central argument of the thesis is that local politicians account for the arrangements of patronal networks and associated uncertainty in their locality and evaluate the functional compatibility of citizen participation with their preferred resources (adapted from Frye, 1997; Kleibrink, 2015). 
An overall purpose of this evaluation is increasing and/or maintaining own access to resources and functions of a local government. These highly subjective and contingent evaluations then translate into participatory institutions, when ● more competitive arrangements of patronal networks produce higher uncertainty, and ● participatory institutions functionally fit the resource preferences of incumbent politicians, especially, mayors.
Empirically, the thesis relies on a comparative case study of the arrangements of patronal networks and the adoption of participatory institutions in five regional centres in Ukraine in 2015-2019: Chernivtsi, Kharkiv, Kropyvnytskyi, Lviv, and Odesa.