Lecture
The political process in Ukraine is aimed at developing the institutions of an independent state and transforming them from post-colonial and post-communist into democratic ones, at establishing new party and electoral systems, at radically changing elements of political culture, and at reforming all spheres of public life. This process is characterised by a clash of interests and values between those social and political forces that advocate reform and those that defend the restoration of the old structures in a somewhat updated form.
The mechanism for making and implementing political decisions in Ukraine requires significant improvement. This concerns, in particular, the procedure for reconciling the interests of various political actors, expert evaluation of projects, the normative basis for a clear definition of the competence and responsibility of the leading decision-making centres, and the formation of an administrative elite.
A second distinctive feature of the political process in Ukraine is its behind-the-scenes character and lack of openness. The state elite sometimes does not want to, and sometimes cannot, involve the public in the process of developing and adopting state-political decisions. And when it does involve the public, it uses it only as a passive and silent argument in support of its own narrowly corporate plans.
Most of the population has not yet developed clear social interests or a social status, and is therefore often an object of manipulation between various political forces. In addition, under conditions of a sharp decline in the population's standard of living, a process of forming marginalised and lumpenised groups is proceeding rapidly; such groups are oriented, in the longer term, toward social and political instability and extremist actions in everyday socio-political life
The political process in Ukraine is characterised by a clash of various group interests and values in the struggle for the distribution of power and property, which leads to political conflicts.
A number of conflict situations in Ukraine arise from the haste with which political decisions are made and from their insufficient justification.
The main shortcomings in the making of political decisions are: the absence of a civilised mechanism for reconciling the interests of various social groups at the stage of discussing a decision through legal lobbying, as well as for taking into account the assessments of independent scholarly expertise; a shortage of personnel with modern management education; and the absence of an established mechanism of checks and balances, as well as of legal accountability, among the various centres of political decision-making. In the current political process of Ukraine, the dominant tendency is the strengthening of the institutions of the Ukrainian state, giving them modern democratic substance through constitutional reform, as well as accelerating the process of economic modernisation.
An analysis of the main specific features of the political process leads to the conclusion that the political space of the Ukrainian state represents a field of a peculiar, unique geo- and socio-political compromise at the level of regional centres of influence, on the one hand, and international ones (along the Russia–West line), on the other. The formation of such a compromise is facilitated to a certain extent by the deep socio-economic crisis, which absorbs significant public and governmental resources, as well as by the underdevelopment of civil society, that is, the absence of a full-fledged public opposition to power. Thus, the political process in Ukraine is at the stage of its formation and constitution, objectively fixing and producing a state of general social stagnation.
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