About event:
We invite you to attend a research seminar “Picking Sweet and Sour Cherries: Patronal Politics and Institutional Mechanisms for Local Citizen Participation in Ukraine until 2019”.
The seminar will focus on the results of the PhD research, explaining, why local governments in a hybrid political regime, such as Ukraine until 2019, adopt institutional mechanisms with varying opportunities for citizen participation.
The central argument of the thesis is that the variation in opportunities for citizen participation is a product of institutional choices of local politicians who aim at maximizing their resources and relevance in local patronal politics. “Patronal” is 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 talk will unpack how 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 to increase 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:1) more competitive arrangements of patronal networks produce higher uncertainty
2) 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.
Speaker:
Oleksandra Keudel - Associate Professor at KSE and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Fellow.
For whom:
Students 3rd year and above, graduate students, educators, and people interested in science.
Language of communication:
English