Erik S. Herron
Eberly Family Professor of Political Science
Department of Political Science
John D. Rockefeller IV School of Policy and Politics
West Virginia University
316 Woodburn Hall, PO Box 6317
Morgantown, WV 26506
esherron@mail.wvu.edu
Nazar Boyko
Director
CIFRA Group, L’viv, Ukraine
nazarboyko83@gmail.com
Michael Thunberg
Department of Political Science
John D. Rockefeller IV School of Policy and Politics
West Virginia University
316 Woodburn Hall, PO Box 6317
Morgantown, WV 26506
This paper was prepared for the 2015 American Political Science Association Conference. The authors thank Andriy Magera and Ukraine’s Central Electoral Commission for access to personnel data and support in conducting personnel surveys; IFES for technical assistance in developing the surveys and permission to interview subjects at IFES sessions; and the participants in the GWU Post-Communist Politics/Social Science Workshop for valuable feedback. The DEC survey received financial support from PACT/UNITER/USAID. The PEC surveys were supported by a National Science Foundation RAPID grant (SES-1462110). All three surveys were conducted in cooperation with the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. The opinions expressed in this paper are the authors’ alone and do not reflect those of other individuals or organizations.
Introduction
The development of a professionalized civil service that can effectively implement laws has been a key concern in the study of the democratization process. Recent scholarship has posited that state development in Eurasia reflects processes antithetical to the emergence of an impartial bureaucracy. Rather than promoting a Weberian-type of bureaucracy centered on technical skills and meritocracy (e.g., Fukuyama 2013), this approach suggests that the legacy of communist governance systems in Eurasia has promoted the development of an “investment market” in which ambitious political actors buy access to government positions to secure advantages for themselves (Engvall 2015). Propelled by corruption, the state is turned into a market in which positions are bought and sold with the expectation that investments will produce returns in the form of favorable policies or other outcomes. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which an “investment market” approach is evident in the administration of elections in Ukraine, and discuss the implications of our findings for the integrity of the electoral process and public administration in post-communist states.
To assess the development of Ukraine’s civil service, we use results from elite-level surveys conducted during the October 2014 snap parliamentary elections. In these surveys, we solicited responses of election administrators to questions about their personal background, features of the commissions, perceptions of readiness and security, and remuneration associated with their positions. The survey items allow us to identify features consistent with a professionalized bureaucracy as well as features reflecting an investment market. By combining survey data with election returns, we are able to gauge whether or not these features affect the performance of administrators in exercising their duties and if civil servants seem to provide “returns on investment” in the form of favorable election outcomes. The analysis serves as a direct evaluation of the investment market framework.