Populism for the ambivalent: anti-polarization and support for Ukraine’s Sluha Narodu party

ABSTRACT

Volodymyr Zelensky and his party Sluha Narodu won Ukraine’s 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections after espousing populist rhetoric. Yet their brand of populism diverged from the far left, the far right, and the center. We propose that Zelensky and Sluha Narodu campaigned as “anti-polarization” populists, drawing on opposition to pre-existing polarization in the Ukrainian political establishment while capitalizing on weak party identification among Ukrainian voters. We utilize electoral results, data from a survey carried out immediately prior to the 2019 parliamentary elections, and interviews to identify Sluha Narodu’s sources of support. We find Sluha Narodu’s supporters were more likely to hold moderately strong or neutral opinions on key issues in Ukrainian politics and to mix both the Russian and Ukrainian languages in their daily lives. Interviews suggest these voters valued character in choosing Sluha Narodu over what were conventionally understood to be salient issues in Ukrainian politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• Ukraine
• polarization

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Phil Roeder and Gunes Murat Tezcur for their helpful feedback on the manuscript, Paul Chaisty and Stephen Whitefield for sharing their survey data, and Anastasiia Danylenko and Oleksiy Kalenichenko for their research assistance. Replication data for this study can be accessed at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/U5Y0ZV (doi:10.7910/DVN/U5Y0ZV)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2022.2082823

Notes

1. Named after a popular television show in which Zelensky played a teacher who is suddenly elected president.

2. Technocratic populists mix anti-elite appeals with proclamations of managerial competence (Buštíková and Guasti 2019; Havlík 2019).

3. See 1:40–2:00 in “Interv’yu Vladimira Zelenskogo–pro voinu na Donbasse, oligarkhov i Slugu Naroda (Interview of Volodymyr Zelensky – about the war in Donbass, Oligachs, and Sluha Narodu)” on the Zelensky’s campaign’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls0tv5M6fMs), accessed 19 May 2022.

4. Following Zelensky’s election, members of his cabinet questioned his competence in leaked audio (Troianovski 2020).

5. Two notable exceptions are Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus and, for a brief period, Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine (Hawkins 2009), although the latter quickly dialed down populist rhetoric after entering office (March 2017).

6. See Wuttke, Schimpf, and Schoen (2020) for an application of these five concepts to public opinion.

7. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgQoL-za1Ow, accessed 15 September 2020.

8. “Zverneniya Prezidenta Ukraini Volodomira Zelens’kogo (Message from President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky)” on Zelensky’s Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf1L9H3vLng, accessed 8 July 2019.

9. Hawkins (2009, 1063) defines Manichean as “moral … and dualistic” with at least an “implication that … there can be no shades of gray.”

10. An offensive term for Ukrainians used colloquially by Ukrainians to describe a brutish or uncultured person.

11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQoz5tdolck, accessed 14 January 2019.

12. Of note, unlike Zelensky and Lukashenko, Saied was a law professor and known intellectual who held some technocratic appeal (Grewal 2021).

13. A notable exception was the Party of Regions, which consisted of a coalition of various competing interests, led by Viktor Yanukovich (Kudelia and Kuzio 2015).

14. Elections were not held in the 26 districts of Crimea, Donetsk, and Lugansk oblasts that remained under occupation.

15. One hundred two (102) of the interviews – at least one in each oblast – were monitored by research assistants hired and trained by the authors to ensure compliance. The survey firm also followed up with respondents to ensure they were surveyed.

16. We chose the number of respondents sampled from each oblast on the basis of contemporary population estimates. Crimea and the parts of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts occupied by pro-Russian separatists in 2019 were not sampled.

17. Or whether they had voted, if surveyed after the elections.

18. Our voter sample stands in contrast to the voter sample in Chaisty and Whitefield’s (2020) survey, where approximately 60% of the respondents who voted said they had voted for Sluha Narodu (see online Appendix 2.2).

19. The final questions involved randomized treatment assignment and are examined elsewhere.

20. See 12:30–14:55 I “Interv’yu Vladimira Zelenskogo – pro voinu na Donbasse, oligarkhov i Slugu Naroda (Interview of Volodymyr Zelensky – about the war in Donbass, Oligarchs, and Sluha Narodu) on the Zelensky’s campaign’s YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls0tv5M6fMs), accessed 14 May 2021.

21. Income is an unreliable indicator of economic well-being in developing societies (Rosenfeld 2017). We instead asked about the percentage of income spent on household expenses. Many respondents chose not to disclose household income when asked directly.

22. We include additional regional covariates and oblast fixed effects in online Appendix 6.

23. Zakazchiki in Russian.

Additional information

Funding

The survey research used in this study was funded by a grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), grant number [830-04g]. The human subjects research in the study was approved by the Internal Review Board at the University of Central Florida, study number “[STUDY00000220]”.