Decentralisation and State-Citizens Relations: the Case of Ukraine

Over the course of the past fifty years, intergovernmental relationships have been marked by a strong decentralisation trend worldwide, which led to a shift in powers, resources and responsibilities from central to subnational government tiers. Whether, how and under what circumstances empowering subnational governments – the most proximate and accessible institutions for exerting citizenship – affects citizens’ political attitudes and behaviours is not yet well understood. If a small body of evidence converges on the existence of a positive effect of decentralisation on subnational electoral participation in Western countries, the wider external validity of this relationship remains unclear. Even less is known about the impact of decentralisation on nonelectoral forms of participation and certain political attitudes. Moreover, existing studies often struggled to circumvent endogeneity issues and predominantly generated observational findings. This dissertation investigates the impact of decentralisation on political attitudes and behaviours by combining between-country and within-country analysis and drawing on mixed methods. After building a global dataset and devoting particular attention to a comprehensive conceptualisation and operationalisation of decentralisation in order to properly capture subnational autonomy, the first empirical chapter finds consistent evidence of a relationship between some dimensions of decentralisation and political participation – although the direction of the relationship varies depending on the decentralisation indicator and on the type of participation – and weaker evidence of a link of local autonomy and political trust. The subsequent chapters focus on the case of Ukraine. They leverage a rare setting that features conditionally exogenous variation in the degree of decentralisation granted to different categories of cities, thus allowing for causal identification. Using a purpose-built dataset that combines official electoral, census, local financial, geospatial and night-time light data from all Ukrainian cities to match on (or control for) the factors which guide treatment allocation, I first elicit the impact of the asymmetric decentralisation regime on political participation in local elections. Matching and regression analyses indicate that local voter turnout is higher by more than four percentage points in cities that hold more decentralised authority. Replications with survey data corroborate this result. Next, multilevel analyses with pooled survey data are performed to examine the effects on various political attitudes. By and large, the extent of local governments’ authority does not seem to influence how citizens think of either local or national political institutions. However, decentralisation appears negatively related to perceived local government performance and indicators related to political interest. The last chapter explores the mechanisms at play to explain the previous results, relying on both quantitative analysis and qualitative case study evidence. Findings suggest that the positive effect on voter turnout could be explained by citizens’ own awareness of the relative stakes of local elections and that local government performance may mediate the relationship between decentralisation and political attitudes. Several academic and policy-relevant insights arise from this simultaneous study of different outcomes of decentralisation. First, this dissertation provides evidence that the positive effect of decentralisation on voter turnout in subnational elections can hold outside Western, established democracies, namely in a context characterised during the treatment period by a hybrid regime and prevalent corruption and clientelism. On the other hand, increased electoral participation should not necessarily be interpreted as a sign of rejuvenated enthusiasm for politics or dwindling political alienation, as suggested by the absence of effect on most political attitudes and the concomitant lower satisfaction with public service delivery in more powerful cities. These findings make a contribution to scholarship concerned with the relative importance of input versus output legitimacy; furthermore, they are of relevance to the large number of countries that share similar background characteristics with Ukraine and where decentralisation reforms were or will be implemented.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Barras, Camille

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• van Houten, Pieter

• decentralisation
• political participation
• electoral participation
• voter turnout
• Ukraine
• political attitudes

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/d5536ee0-0421-4a7a-bda8-a428602f94ab/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.113969

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/376942