Critical election or frozen cleavages? How voters chose parties in the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election

Ukraine's 2014 parliamentary election, which took place in the aftermath of the Maidan revolution of February 2014 and at the height of war in the East of the country, appeared to produce significant party political realignment. In particular, support for parties that had represented the Russian element of the ethno-linguistic/geo-political cleavage that had dominated electoral competition in Ukraine since independence collapsed. The paper considers whether 2014 was a ‘critical’ or ‘realigning’ election for Ukraine. Our argument is that the 2014 election lacked the conditions that critical elections theory posits as necessary and that, on the contrary, there are strong theoretical reasons to expect cleavage stability in these volatile electoral circumstances. We offer evidence for this continuity drawn from surveys undertaken among Ukrainian voters from 1995 to 2014.