Role of political values in the process of regime transformation: a comparison of Russia and Ukraine

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Government of the Russian Federation

FEDERAL STATE AUTONOMOUS EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION FOR HIGHER EDUCATION NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY “HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS”

Faculty of Social Sciences

MASTER THESIS

Role of political values in the process of regime transformation: a comparison of Russia and Ukraine

Varvara Podrugina

Scientific Supervisor Boris Makarenko

Moscow, 2020



Contents

Introduction

1. Values and Political Regimes - Theoretical Framework

1.1 Conceptualizing Political Culture and Values

1.2 Values and Political Regime

1.3 Values as a Bridge between Causes and Actors

1.4 Inglehart and Welzel's Revised Modernization Theory

1.4.1 Cultural zones. Orthodox and Post-Communist

1.4.2 Indices of post-materialism and emancipative values

1.4.2.1 Post-Materialist Index

1.4.2.2 Emancipative Values Index

2. Comparison of Russia and Ukraine

2.1 Design and Choice of Cases

2.2 Data and Methodology

2.3 Findings

2.3.1 Emancipative values

2.3.2 Post-Materialism

2.3.3 Correlation with Democracy Level

2.4 Interpretation and Analysis

2.4.1 Russia

2.4.2 Ukraine

2.5 Limitations and space for further research

Conclusion

References

Appendix



Introduction

political culture value transformation

Thirty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years after, the Soviet Union collapsed. Till nowadays, wide discussion of these events continues, which proves how hard it is to underestimate their huge symbolic meaning. Although the third wave of democratization started more than 15 years before them, with the transformation of Portugal (Huntington 1991), it is undoubtfully the events of the 1989-1991 that have become the greatest manifestation of the third wave. Liberal euphoria and expectations of the “end of history” dominated the minds in the next ten years.

However, thirty years after democratization in the countries of the communist bloc started, it is still far from complete. While most of the western post-communist states nowadays do enjoy democratic rule, few of their eastern neighbors can boast the same (Makarenko, 2019). Most regimes continue to pursue their path of transformation. Not always is it directed from authoritarianism to democracy, as it was in the beginning of the third wave. Some of the regimes got stuck in a hybrid conditions, others experienced an authoritarian backsliding.

This accounts for a once again rising interest in study of the reasons of regime transformation. In the “glory days” of transitology two approaches dominated the subfield. The first one emphasized the role of structural pre-requisites, such as economic growth, per capita income, socio-economic inequality, ethnic homogeneity, colonial heritage, geographic closeness to democratic countries. The proponents of the second, actor-oriented approach, supposed democratization occurs due to the specific decisions and actions of elites and masses.

Very soon it became clear, no one factor can fully explain a success or failure of transition even in one single country. It is always a combination of different factors. Moreover, even one approach can hardly cover the whole process of transformation: in order to explain it, both structural and procedural traditions need to be applied. Nevertheless, researches continued to search for the “magic pill” that would be able to once and for all answer the question: why do regimes change?

In our view, Ronald Inglehard and Cristian Welzel's revised modernization theory came closest to fulfilling this task. According to them, both structures and policy matter, but even more important is what links them - changes in values. Economic growth increases people's feeling of security and well-being, so they do not have to care about their survival anymore and their focus slowly shifts to what Inglehart and Welzel unite under the label of “self-expression values”. This new mindset includes a rise in emancipative values, which boosts people's aspirations to exercise freedoms. If the existing regime does not allow them to do so, their demand for new rights motivates them to change it, and the transformation begins. It can only happen, when the regime becomes enough incongruent with dominant values. Or, to put it in the words of one of Mikhail Bulgakov's famous characters, “ruin is not caused by lavatories but it's something that starts in people's heads”, meaning that regime transformation starts with change in values rather than institutions.

In our work we want to study the second “half” of Inglehart and Welzel's mechanism - the link between values and regime transformation - and test in on the example of Russia and Ukraine. Both countries belong to the Orthodox cultural zone and experienced a 70-year period of Communist rule. On Inglehart's cultural map, where the vertical axis shows the “traditional-secular” dimension of values and horizontal - the “survival-self-expression” one they are located in the top left corner, although for the last 30 years they have been moving downwards and to the right, meaning that they have become more traditional and less survival-oriented.

Still, their position on the map remains quite close to each other and, in general, Russia and Ukraine have not often been compared between each other from the perspective of values. There has been much research on cross-cultural zones differences or even sub-zones, but Russia and Ukraine are usually united as “ex-USSR” in contrast to other states of the communist bloc (Klingemann, Fuchs, Zielonka, 2006) or “eastern part of the communist Europe” in contrast to the western (Makarenko, Melville, 2015). One of the few examples of comparison of Russia and Ukraine between each other was conducted by Surzhko-Harned and Turkina and covered the whole scope of values. The authors ran regressions using the data of the World Values Survey (further - WVS) and established strong correlations between Russia and Ukraine in almost all kinds of values, except for the ones, which, according to the authors' suggestion, matter most for political activism and, consequently, foster regime transformations (Surzhko-Harned and Turkina, 2018).

We also assume that the variation in Russian and Ukrainian dominant values, especially in emancipative ones, among other factors, account for their different democratic performance. Both countries embarked the pass of an all-encompassing political transformation being parts of one regime - the Soviet Union. Apart from similar values, they both enjoyed relatively favorable structural preconditions for democratization in comparison to other post-communist states. Back then the countries could have been seen as the “most similar systems” that shared presidential-parliamentary institutional design, common soviet legacy in economic, political and social spheres, and a similar goal of building a “new” national identity, market economy and a new political system. Even the “resource curse” could be applied not only to the oil- and gas-rich Russia, but to a more limited extent - to Ukraine, whose economy became partly dependent on the transit of Russian gas to Europe (Makarenko, Melville, 2015).

Yet, despite all similarities, 30 years after the process of transformation began, Ukraine enjoys a much higher level of democracy than Russia, no matter what index we use to measure it. We hypothesize, this gap resulted from differences in the level of emancipative values in the countries. At the same time, we do not deny the role of other factors. Economic fragmentation, autonomous parliament, East-West cleavage, higher exposure to Western influence did favor democratization in Ukraine, while oil-curse, threat of separatism and terrorism and conservatism of the elites led to the authoritarian backsliding of Russia (Makarenko, Melville, 2015). But we assume, following the logic of Inglehart and Welzel, that these factors formed the regime through the intermediate variable of changes in values.

To sum up, our general scientific puzzle is why political regimes change? In specific, what role do values play in this process? So, the subject of the work is the process of regime transformation. We will study this phenomenon on the example of Russia and Ukraine, so the object of our research is the role of values in the process of regime transformation in Russia and Ukraine. Following the logic Inglehart and Welzel's model, we ask the research question: does higher level of emancipative values and post-materialism lead to a higher level of democracy? Our hypothesis is that lower quality of democracy in Russia in 2000s-2010s in comparison to Ukraine can be explained through correspondingly lower level of emancipative values in post-materialism in 1990s and 2000s.

To compare dominant values in Russia and Ukraine we use the data of Waves 3, 5 and 6 of the WVS. Unfortunately, those are the only waves, in which both countries participated, which determined our research time period: we compare the values of 1995-2006 (period between measurements in Russia and Ukraine during Wave 3 and Wave 5) and 2006-2011 (period between Wave 5 and Wave 6). According to the theory, the link is directed from changes in values towards changes in regime, so the level of democracy is measured in periods that temporally follow the periods of values measurements: 2000-2010 and 2011-2016. It means the whole research period of our work is from 1995 to 2016.

Contrary to the research by Surzhko-Harned and Turkina mentioned earlier, we will not compare all values covered by the WVS. Instead, we chose a specific subset of values that is supposed to lead to democratization - emancipative values. We transform the index of emancipative values from the WVS so that we could make a cross-national comparison and observe its dynamic in Russia and Ukraine during our research period. Since emancipative values are a subset of self-expression values and focus on them means society is experiencing a shift from materialism to post-materialism, we include the index of post-materialism in our analysis and compare its dynamic in Russia and Ukraine using the same procedure as for the emancipative values.

We already stated that Russia lies behind Ukraine when it comes to democracy level, but in order to see if this gap correlates with differences in values dynamic, we need an index of democracy level. We chose the one by Freedom House, because it emphasizes the empowering features of democracy, which is in accordance with Inglehart and Welzel's approach (Inglehart, Welzel, 2005a). Then we observe, if changes in emancipative values and post-materialism were followed by corresponding changes in political regimes of Russia and Ukraine and interpret the quantitative results. Found correlations do not allow us to establish causal relationship between values and regime change but does reveal some counterintuitive implications of Inglehart and Welzel's theory in case of Russia and Ukraine.

The work consists of two chapters. The first one covers the theoretical framework. First, it focuses on the development of the “culturalist” approach, which implies that institutions of a society depend on its culture and dominant values. We describe the concept of political culture and briefly trace its history from Aristotle to Almond and Verba, whose work “The civic culture: Political attitudes and democracy in five nations” was and probably remains the most influential way of conceptualizing political culture and its role for political regimes. With a reference to this work, Inglehart and Welzel elaborated these ideas, widening the approach by including the role of culture and values in general, not only in their political dimensions. We then proceed to focusing on the meaning of values in the process of regime transformation and with the help of Inglehart and Welzel's revised modernization theory integrate the values-variable into the system of knowledge about transits and democratization. A whole section is devoted to the indices of emancipative values and post-materialism, because we will need them in our empirical analysis in the second part.

In the second chapter we apply Inglehart and Welzel's theory to the transformation processes in Russia and Ukraine. First, we emphasize the role of already well-known structural pre-requisites and policies as factors of their democratization, then we try to introduce the values-variable in the analysis. We transform the indices of emancipative values and post-materialism, as well as the index of democracy by freedom house and then check if a rise/fall in the values indices was temporally followed by a rise/fall in democracy index. Finally, we interpret the results. Before proceeding to conclusion, we make important remarques on the limitations of our work. Some of them are quite hard to overcome, others may be resolved within future research.

Apart from multiple pieces by Inglehart and Welzel, our research relies on classic theoretic works on regime transformation by Diamond, Lipset, Przeworski, Rustow, Eckstein, di Palma, Shugart and Carey. The empirical part on Russia and Ukraine is based on the studies of the region by Boris Makarenko, Andrei Melville, David Laitin, Stephen Whitfield, Taras Kuzio, Yuriy Matsiyevsky, Hans-Dieter Klingemann and others.



1. Values and Political Regimes - Theoretical Framework

1.1 Conceptualizing Political Culture and Values

Structure and functioning of any society are determined by norms that are applied in this society. The norms, in turn, are based on the beliefs and values of the members. This idea is as old as the social thought itself: Herodotus and Thucydides described the differences between peoples (Greeks versus Persians and Athenians versus Spartans correspondingly) by comparing personal characteristics that these peoples considered virtues. The interconnection between social institutions and dominant “virtues” was further elaborated by Aristotle (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005a) and then marked by many philosophers and historians like, for instance, Nestor the Chronicler who conducted a sort of qualitative comparative analysis of Eastern Slavic tribes.

Aristotelian vision served as an inspiration for many philosophers of the Modern times, such as Montesquieu (Montesquieu, 1748) or Tocqueville. When studying the newly born American state, the latter concluded that the “civic spirit” of the American people is reflected in all institutions and norms (Tocqueville, 1837). Later this “spirit” and its influence over social system in the US will be explained through ethic-religious ground by Max Weber (Weber, 1905).

Although, as we showed, the philosophical roots of the “political culture” concept can be traced back to the times of Antiquity, the concept itself was truly coined and defined in the 20th century by Almond and Verba. According to them, political culture is a set of individual cognitive, affective and evaluational orientations. They are linked to political objects, which imply the “general” political system, the specific roles or structures in the system, the incumbents of roles and public policies (Almond & Verba, 1963).

Depending on the exact combination of these elements, Almond and Verba suggest differentiating between parochial, subject, and participant political cultures. In real life, though, as it almost always is with strict classifications, we would rarely come across any of these ideal types. The best possible mixture of them is referred to as “civic culture”, in the sense that it is the most consistent with democratic society, which will be discussed further.

Many social scientists have since then studied the role of culture in political processes. With a reference to the approach-founding work of Almond and Verba, Inglehart and Welzel elaborated a wider paradigm: according to them, political culture, that is knowledge, feelings and judgements about political objects, derives from a wider set of dominant beliefs and values. So, the nature of a society depends not only on political culture, but on values in general. This approach presupposes values can be measured in two dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values and survival versus self-expression values (Inglehart, 1977).

Since 1981 the researches have been conducting surveys and creating the biggest database of values around the world. Basing on this micro-level analysis, they distributed all participant countries among different “cultural zones” according to their similar position on both scales of values (Inglehart et al., 2014). We will base our analysis on Inglehart and Welzel's understanding of values and their role for political regimes, so in the following subsections we will have a closer look on their revised theory of modernization.

1.2 Values and Political Regime

According to the culturalist approach, dominant values to a large extent determine the nature of political regimes. However, since it is only one of many factors that influence the functioning of institutions in a state, it would be too deterministic to state that a set of specific values equals a certain political regime. Still, much research has been conducted to study this link.

For our work it is important, what values are most consistent with democratic regimes. It is worth noting that we, continuing the research tradition of Dahl rather than Przeworski, consider democracy a scale concept (Bernhagen, 2015). Thus, we assume that a regime can be not just democratic or non-democratic, but more and less democratic. By more democratic we mean more responsive to people's needs and aspirations, which implies that institutions are effective, and elites are held accountable for their actions (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005a). Besides, a “good” democracy is consolidated and, consequently, stable. Our gradual understanding of democracy also infers that for our research purposes the aspect of holding regular elections is not sufficient for a regime to be labeled democratic. The liberal aspect of democracy, that is, respecting political rights and civil liberties, is the key measuring aspect. That is why in the second chapter we compare the levels of democracy using the Freedom House index.

So, the more people in a society have pro-democratic values, the more democratic regime the society enjoys. According to Diamond, such values include protection of individual rights, respect for the rule of law, pluralism and tolerance in civil society (Diamond, 1999). Inglehart and Welzel call them “emancipative values”, which will be the focus of the next subsections, together with the mechanism of transforming the society into more or less democratic through changes in mass beliefs.

There is no doubt among mainstream political scientists, there is indeed a link between the regime of a state and dominant values of its people. One of the biggest debates in the field has been around the question: “What comes first - values or structures”? The “culturalist approach”, while far from a coherent paradigm, has one core unifying idea: culture or values have to be present in people's mind prior to the establishment of specific institutions.

This is especially true for democratic institutions: for a “good” (effective and consolidated) democracy to emerge, people have to genuinely believe in its use and feel natural about its practices and norms. Or, as di Palma puts it, to accept it as “the only game in town” (di Palma, 1990). In contrast to the culturalist approach, institutionalists assume that values are incorporated in people's mindsets through institutions and norms (Rustow, 1970). This “chicken-or-egg” dilemma has an important implication both in modern political theory and practice - can a certain political regime (i.e democracy) be established by accepting necessary norms and institutions, which then will transform the political culture, or certain values must precede regime transformation? Practical experience of democracy export favors the second - culturalist - approach (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005a).

Given that values affect structure, how exactly can they make it change? In order to answer this question, the proponents of “culturalist” approach have developed the congruence theory, which states that a political regime is only stable to the extent, to which it corresponds to the predominant values in the society (Eckstein, 1966). In other words, as long as people in a country believe their government has the right to govern (consider it legitimate), they obey the existing norms and prolong the status-quo. On the contrary, incongruence between values and social structures engenders people's alienation that destabilizes the system (Almond & Verba, 1963).

1.3 Values as a Bridge between Causes and Actors

Incongruence between dominant values and institutional framework is only one of many ways to explain why regimes can transform in general and democratize in specific. The glory days of the political science subfield known as “transitology” have gone, as real life has proven there is no universally effective “magic pill” a state could get to become a consolidated liberal democracy. Both in spite and because of it, the study of causes and actors of regime transformation has never stopped. Democratization has in many cases, including the ones we are researching in this work - Russia and Ukraine - proven to be an ongoing and non-linear transformation process rather than a moment of irreversible transition.

Two big approaches to democratization prioritize different driving forces of transformation. So called “structuralists” focus on the role of structural pre-requisites: economic growth, per capita income, socio-economic inequality, ethnic homogeneity, world market integration, colonial heritage, dominant religion, global media exposure, geographic closeness to democratic countries. In contrast, the proponents of the actor-oriented approach suppose democratization occurs due to the specific actions of elites and masses.

As we said earlier, none of the factors is a “magic pill” and can explain even the transformation process of one regime on its own: it is always an interplay of factors and, moreover, for each case a different combination of factors matters. Some of them are more important on the stage of initial transition, others matter more for further consolidation or, vice versa, backsliding. Besides, neither structural, nor actor-oriented approach can explain the whole process of democratization: the former fails to grasp the mechanism, how existing pre-requisites lead to collective action that would result in regime transformation. The later one shows, how democratization happens by studying the actions, but does not reveal, why it happens. In other words, none of the approaches gets to see the link between structures and actions. Inglehart and Welzel assume that mass beliefs and values can fill the gap and their theory can serve as a bridge between the research traditions (Welzel, Inglehart, 2015).

Economic modernization has been one of the most popular explanations of democratization (Lipset, 1959; Burkhart, Lewis-Beck, 1994). Since the end of 1950s, when modernization theory emerged, it has been rightfully questioned, for instance, on the example of countries experiencing authoritarian modernization or oil-rich countries. Other researchers tried to prove modernization can only help an already existing democracy to survive, but not result in the emergence of a new one (Przeworski, Limongi, 1997). Yet the theory has never been fully abandoned, since in most cases the correlation between economic performance and democratization does exist (Welzel, 2015).

The link between economic performance and democracy has been obvious not only to social scientists, but to people in general: most people nowadays want to live in a democratic state (Klingemann, 1999). At least, they say so - many of them think of democracy as of the best political regime because they consciously or unconsciously link it to economic prosperity, which the longest-living western democracies demonstrate. The genuine wish for democratic rule for its inherent properties, thus, cannot be revealed with a simple question “what political regime do you want to live in”? It requires deeper psychological analysis of a person's attitudes and values, which, as we will describe further, Inglehart and Welzel call “emancipative” (Welzel, Inglehart, 2015).

The opponents of the modernization theory are right to the extent that better economic performance does not lead to democratization automatically. But it indeed does so via intermediate variables - urbanization, industrialization, better education and health system, but most importantly - through changes in dominant values (Lipset, 1959; Inglehart, 1977).

1.4 Inglehart and Welzel's Revised Modernization Theory

According to Inglehart and Welzel, democratization falls into a larger process of modernization. Apart from political progress, that is democratization, this process also encompasses human empowerment in socio-economic and cultural sphere. The underlying idea of modernization is, thus, to expand human's freedom of choice. In the core of this process are changing dominant values. Inglehart and Welzel, as we mentioned, suggest operating two dimensions of them: secular versus traditional values and survival versus self-expression ones.

To be more precise, the mechanism is the following: socio-economic development increases the feeling of security and well-being, which, in turn, leads to the shift from traditional to secular values. This mostly happens during the transition from agrarian to industrial societies. However, the dominance of secular values does not imply an automatic transition to democracy, because in political terms it only leads to prioritizing rational institutional legitimacy over sacral-traditional one. In fact, two of the most non-democratic regimes in history - The Soviet Union and the Third Reich - emerged after the shift from traditional to secular values (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005a).

But if the feeling of economic security and well-being is persistent and increasing - not like in the Soviet Union or the Third Reich, but rather like in Western Europe in the second half of the 20^th century - it rises the sense of individual agency among people, which leads to the shift in minds - from survival to self-expression values. This “silent revolution” happens during the transition from industrial to knowledge societies, so the shift can also be referred to as the one from materialist to post-materialist values.

The shift from materialism to post-materialism cannot be seen separately from a broader process of human empowerment, which happens in three dimensions: socio-economic, socio-cultural and legal-institutional. On the socio-economic level, it takes the form of growing action resources, which increase people's capabilities to exercise freedoms. On the socio-cultural level, it advances as a rise of a specific kind of self-expression values - emancipative ones, which boosts people's aspirations to exercise freedoms. Finally, on the legal-institutional level, widened democratic rights increase people's entitlements to exercise freedoms.

If a person in his or her pre-adult years experienced high level of socioeconomic security and well-being, as it was in post-war Western Europe, he or she will focus on survival less than on self-expression (Inglehart, 1977). Emancipative values, in turn, change people's attitude towards democracy, in the sense that they start to value it for its inner properties rather than for its empirical link with prosperity. Then, in accordance with the congruence theory, critical-liberal desire for democracy will trigger legal-constitutional changes. It can happen, though, that the shift to post-materialism happens in a country, which is already a democracy. In this case, not only will rising emancipative values prevent the country from an authoritarian backsliding, but also lead to a more responsive democracy (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005a).

To conclude, values are a bridge between economic performance and democracy. The mechanism is the following: prosperity leads to the subjective feeling of existential security and well-being. It changes human beliefs and values towards higher appreciation of freedom and self-expression. The rise of emancipative values turns into people's demand for rights, which requires institutional changes and sometimes regime transformation. Speaking of the “chicken-or-egg” problem we discussed above, culturalists Inglehart and Welzel emphasize that the direction of causality is from values to institutions and not the opposite (Welzel et al., 2012). We are interested in this second “half” of the mechanism - from change in values towards change in regime - and want to test it on the example of Russia and Ukraine. Before proceeding to this in the second chapter, a few more theoretical remarks are needed.

1.4.1 Cultural zones. Orthodox and Post-Communist

In its essence, the revised theory of modernization has roots in Marxist ideas: economic base determines spiritual superstructure. However, Inglehart and Welzel warn from being deterministic: although they claim this process to be universal, it has large variations when comes across traditions of the societies of different cultural zones (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005a). The countries of one zone have similar positions on the scales of “traditional-secular” and “survival-self-expression” values because they are more or less at the same stage of modernization. But they also demonstrate historically driven cultural similarities. This heritage prevents countries in different zones from convergence, although they all tend to follow the same pattern and at different pace move towards secular and self-expression values as their economic security and well-being increase.

All countries participating in WVS were allocated between cultural zones according to their dominant values and historical heritage. Our cases of study - Russia and Ukraine - belong to the Orthodox culture zone. It is located in the top-left corner of the map, meaning that most countries in this zone have relatively high level of secular values, but closer to the “survival pole” on the horizontal scale. Since the beginning of the 1990s, when the WVS measurements first started in most post-soviet countries, the zone has significantly shifted downwards - to traditional values. In some countries it happened due to the resurgence of religion, which was oppressed during 70 years of communist rule. Some countries “retraditionalized” due to the wish to restate natural path of socio-cultural development, as if it had never been interrupted by communism (Makarenko, 2019).

Emancipative values, which are supposed to matter most for democratization, are a set of self-expression values, so movements along the horizontal scale is more important for this work. The orthodox cultural zone as a whole moved slightly to the right towards the “self-expression” pole since the beginning of 1990s. So, the countries have become more post-materialist, but they still lie behind not only the clusters of the “developed West” - Protestant Europe, English-speaking countries and Catholic Europe - but also Latin America. Moreover, quite a few countries in the African-Islamic cluster are closer to the “self-expression” pole than most countries in the Orthodox zone. However, the variation is quite significant among countries in one zone, so let us have a closer look on our cases of research - Russia and Ukraine.

Russia and Ukraine have been close to each other on the culture map and both slightly moved from top-left corner to the center. However, they have not been overlapping, meaning that their position on the scales “traditional-secular” and “survival-self-expression” values have not been identical. More specifically, in 1990 (2^rd wave of WVS), when the survey took place only in Russia but not in Ukraine, dominant values in Russia were very secular and closer to survival than to self-expression. During the 3^rd wave of WVS (1995 for Ukraine and 1996 for Russia) the positions of countries were almost the same, and Russia experienced a backslide on both scales. Neither Russia nor Ukraine participated in the 4^th wave of WVS, but by the 5^th wave (2006 for both countries), Russia has become significantly more traditional and even closer to survival values, than during the 3^rd wave. Ukraine was also lower on the vertical scale and just a bit closer to the “self-expression” pole than Russia. After the measurements of the 6^th wave (2011) the countries were almost on the same level on vertical scale and Ukraine this time was a little closer to the “survival” pole, than Russia (Inglehart et al., 2014).



1.4.2 Indices of post-materialism and emancipative values

While making the cultural zones map and conducting research based on the data from the WVS, Inglehart and Welzel have developed many indices to measure values. We will need two of them in our analysis - the index of post-materialism and the index of emancipative values. They are different but show the same tendency of human emancipation. Post-materialist index is conceptually wider and supposed to show if or how successfully a country has experienced a shift from materialist to post-materialist dominant values. In terms of cultural zones map, it shows how far a country has moved to the right, that is, from survival to self-expression values. Emancipative values are a specific subset of self-expression values, so it is a narrower concept and index. They imply an emphasis on freedom of choice and equality of opportunities.

According to the revised modernization theory, it is a rise in emancipative values that accounts for an increasing demand for democratization and, consequently, regime transformation. So, when comparing Russian and Ukraine in the second chapter, we could limit ourselves to this index and its impact on democratization. However, we decided to also include the post-materialism index in our analysis, since it reflects the same tendency in human mind, but covers a wider scope of values. If we find correlation between democracy level and each index, we could assume, it is indeed, as the theory states, emancipative values as a part of post-materialist worldview that, among other factors, matter for democratization. But if only one of the indices correlates with democracy level, further interpretation will be needed. Besides, the two indices are measured differently, which also gives us an opportunity to check the hypothesis of the importance of a specific kind of values. It is also worth noting that differentiating among various categories of values is hard and sometimes loose. But for our work it is crucial that the post-materialism index reflects people's general worldview, while the emancipative values index shows specific political values. Differences in measurement also help interpreting the indices separately, so before proceeding to using them in our analysis, we have to see those differences in the next two subsections.

1.4.2.1 Post-Materialist Index

This index aims at measuring the proportion of post-materialists in a country. In order to do it, the authors included a specific question in the WVS. First, it covered 4 items and sounded as follows:

“If you had to choose among the following things, which are the two that seem most desirable to you?

1) Maintaining order in the nation;

2) Giving the people more say in important political decisions;

3) Fighting rising prices;

4) Protecting freedom of speech”.

The authors of the questionnaire considered two of these items, namely the 1^st and 3^rd, materialist, as they relate to the protection and acquisition of property. The 2^nd and 4^th items are referred to as post-materialist as they put an emphasis on self-expression and freedom of choice. If a respondent chooses the two post-materialist items, he or she gets “3” as a score and is considered a post-materialist. If none of them is chosen, the score is “1”, and the person is labeled as a materialist. Finally, those who choose only one of the post-materialist items, get “2” and belong to the “mixed group”. As all of the choices might be desirable, the measure relates to the `relative priority' of the materialistic choices over the 2nd and 4th policy goals and addresses the trade-offs that are typical for political choices. The bigger the proportion of people with higher score, the more post-materialist the country they live in is (Inglehart, 1977).

The 4-item PMI is highly sensitive to short-coming shocks, such as unemployment or inflation. So, a more comprehensive and robust index was developed. It is this index that we will use in our comparative analysis, so a closer look is needed to what it is composed of. It consists of three sets of four priorities, between which respondents have to choose. One of them replicates the 4-item PMI, the others have the following points:

First set:

· A high level of economic growth

· Making sure this country has strong defense forces

· Seeing that people have more say about how things are done at their jobs and in their communities

· Trying to make our cities and countryside more beautiful

Second set:

· A stable economy

· Progress toward a less impersonal and more humane society

· Progress toward a society in which Ideas count more than money

· The fight against crime

The answers are to interpret seemingly to the ones in the 4-item index, but in this case, due to multiple sets, the “score” of the respondents vary from 1 to 5 instead of 1 to 3. In second chapter we will refer to this “score” as to the levels of post-materialism, demonstrated by a certain proportion of people in a country. We then will transform it into an integrated index of post-materialism, so that we better conduct cross-country and cross-period comparison.

1.4.2.2 Emancipative Values Index

This index is used to see the proportions of people in a country, who demonstrate a certain level of emancipative values. However, in contrast to the post-materialist index, this one is not measured with the help of a separate question of the WVS. Instead, it is calculated basing on the answers, given to other questions of the survey, which reveal respondents' attitude towards the idea of emancipation. In general, a person with high level of emancipative values prioritizes egalitarism over hierarchy, tolerance over strict compliance with norms, autonomy over authority and self-expression over existential security (Welzel, Inglehart, 2015).

To measure the level of emancipation values, Welzel suggests including four sub-indices: autonomy, choice, equality and voice. They correspond to the two key orientations of emancipative values: emphasis on freedom of choice (autonomy and choice - liberating orientation) and equality of opportunities (equality and voice - egalitarian orientation) (Welzel, 2013a). For each sub-index Welzel chose four items from the WVS questionnaire, making the emancipative values index also a 12-item one. In his work “Freedom Rising” Welzel explains the choice of items and the whole procedure of constructing the index of emancipative values:

“To measure people's emphasis on autonomy, I use three items revealing whether respondents consider (a) independence and (b) imagination as desirable child qualities but do not consider (c) obedience as such a quality. To measure how strongly people value freedom in their reproductive choices, I use three items indicating how acceptable respondents find (a) divorce, (b) abortion, and (c) homosexuality. The most basic area of equality is gender equality. To measure a respondent's emphasis on gender equality, I use three items indicating how strongly they disagree with the statements that (a) “education is more important for a boy than a girl”; (b) “when jobs are scarce, men should have priority over women to get a job”; and (c) “men make better political leaders than women.” To measure how strongly the respondents value the voice of the people as a source of influence in their society, I use three items from Inglehart's (1977) materialism/post-materialism batteries. These items indicate whether respondents assign first, second, or no priority to the goals of (a) protecting freedom of speech, (b) giving people more say in important government decisions, and (c) giving people more say about how things are done at their jobs and in their communities”.

As we can see, the calculation of one sub-index - voice - overlaps with the post-materialism index. All the four sub-indices are then integrated in one index of emancipative values, which is since the beginning of the WVS presented in country reports as a set of intervals from 0.0 to 1.0. These intervals show the level of emancipative values of corresponding proportions of people in each country. In the second chapter we will refer to them as to the intervals or levels of emancipation values and make our integrated index, so that we better conduct cross-country and cross-period comparison.

Values are very difficult to operationalize and measure, and much critic has been expressed on those indices (Clarke et al., 1997, Davis & Davenport, 1999) and on the whole Inglehart and Welzel's thesis (Dalton, 1977). Still, studying the dynamics of the indices of emancipative values and post-materialism and comparing their values in different countries may reveal non-obvious correlation with regime transformation. In the next chapter we will try to do so on the example of Russia and Ukraine.



2. Comparison of Russia and Ukraine

2.1 Design and Choice of Cases

Russia and Ukraine embarked the path of transformation when they were parts of one regime - Soviet Union. Just as for most countries who experienced a largescale transformation during the third wave of democratization, for Russia and Ukraine policies and actions of elites seemed to matter more than structural pre-requisites in the initial phase of transformation (Makarenko, Melville, 2015), although structural factors did influence the process. Back then, Russia and Ukraine shared many key aspects and enjoyed relatively favorable structural preconditions for democratization in comparison to other post-communist states. Among other factors, Russia and Ukraine shared common soviet legacy in economic, political and social spheres, similar goal of building a “new” national identity, market economy and a new political system. But 30 years after, the process of transformation and building a consolidated democracy has not been accomplished yet (Makarenko, 2019).

The extent, to which Russia and Ukraine advanced in this process, is different: no matter what index we use, today's level of democracy is considerably lower in Russia than in Ukraine. We will use Freedom House index, according to which both countries experienced an authoritarian backsliding since the beginning of transformation, but in Russia it has been much more consistent and stronger than in Ukraine. In this respect, the countries may be considered “most-similar systems”, which initially had much in common but ended up in very different conditions. Many researchers have tried to figure out, what was this missing part that made it “all go wrong” for Russia (in comparison with Ukraine or western post-communist countries).

One of the most credible explanations emphasized the role of oil and gas in Russian economy and politics. The “resource curse” argument does work for Russia. But it also works in a milder form for Ukraine and Belarus, whose economies have quickly become partly dependent on the transit of Russian fossils (Makarenko, Melville, 2015). Yet, their political regimes and levels of democracy are even less similar than the ones of Russia and Ukraine. Obviously, other factors also mattered in the process of Russian and Ukrainian transformation, and the “resource curse” argument may be accepted as explaining the differences only if combined with other arguments. For example, one of such factors would be fragmentation of the economic interest groups, which contributed to political pluralism in Ukraine.

Ethnic homogeneity and national identity are probably the most ambiguous factors in our cases. In Russia ethnic conflicts in Northern Caucasus and the threat of terrorism required the management of a “strong-hand” leader and served as one of many justifications of consolidation of power in the hands of the president (Malashenko, Trenin, 2002). So did the identity-building role of a “great power” with nuclear weapon, implying huge responsibility for maintaining peace and stability in the country. In Ukraine, the cleavage between Ukrainian and Russian has become highly politicized and was nourished by international context and fight for pro-Russian or pro-western national identity. This, together with economic fragmentation and a relatively autonomous parliament, ensured higher degree of political pluralism (Makarenko, Melville, 2015).

The autonomy of Ukrainian parliament resulted from the presidential-parliamentary system, which is considered to be better for an emerging democracy more than presidential (Shugart, Carey, 1992). Russia also enjoyed presidential-parliamentary system on the initial stage of transformation, but later consolidation of power, or strengthening of the “power vertical”, turned it into a de-facto presidential system. Institutional design is usually put forward as one more influential argument explaining higher level of democracy in Ukraine. But we consider the explanation shallow and tautological. It is hard to deny some institutions suit emerging democracies better. However, this argument does not answer the key questions: why some countries introduce such institutions and other do not? Why they are more effective in some countries than in the others? Any of those puzzles would require considering other factors that form democratic regime through the right institutions (Inglehart & Welzel, 2015).

As we said in the previous chapter, there is no “magic pill” for successful democratization, so we cannot find “the winner” in this competition of factors. However, with the reference to Inglehart and Welzel's revised modernization theory, we assume that while all of these factors did matter for regime transformation, there has been also an intermediate variable - dominant values. Structural factors influence political regimes through change in values, which encourages elites and masses to take actions that can lead to better democracy.

So, we want to test the link between the level of post-materialism and emancipative values and the level (quality) of democracy in Russia and Ukraine. We would like to specify that within this work we do not study the influence of structural factors on the value (the first “half” of Inglehart and Welzel's mechanism) and take it a primary assumption based not only on theoretical findings of Inglehart and Welzel, but also on empirical research on values in Russia and Ukraine (f.e. in Lebedeva, Dimitrova, Berry, 2018).

Besides, in our research we are constrained to a certain time period due to availability of data. We will calculate the level post-materialism and emancipative in Russia and Ukraine basing on the data of three years: 1995/6, 2006 and 2011. Then we will see how the democracy level changed in both countries after each moment of measurement. As we know that the level of democracy in Russia has been lower than in Ukraine in the last twenty years, we assume that this gap has resulted from different level of emancipative values and post-materialism. To be more precise, we expect that both parameters (emancipative values and post-materialism) were lower in Russia during the period of study.



2.2 Data and Methodology

For our analysis we use the data compelled by Inglehart et al. within the third, fifth and sixth waves of the WVS. Only those three waves contain data concerning both Russia and Ukraine, which is our main empirical limitation. We will compare the level of emancipative values in Russia and Ukraine in 1995/6 (1995 for Russia and 1996 for Ukraine), 2006 and 2011 - in these years the three waves of the WVS were conducted in the countries. As we described in the theoretical chapter, the index of emancipative values is calculated by Inglehart et al. separately for each wave and participating country. But the authors present it as the percentage of the population of every country distributed among the intervals, corresponding to different levels of emancipative values (from 0.0 to 1.0 - Figure 1), which makes it difficult for cross-national comparison.