Paul Chaisty publishes new chapter 'Electoral Competition and Election Pledges in Ukraine'

Paul Chaisty, Professor of Russian and East European Politics and co-author Svitlana Chernykh have contributed a chapter to a newly published book Democratic Mandates: What Politicians Promise and (fail to) Deliver (Routledge, 2026).

The chapter, 'Electoral Competition and Electoral Pledges in Ukraine', explores how political parties develop electoral pledges in evolving democracies and what form these pledges take. The authors hypothesize that in an unconsolidated democracy electoral competition has the potential to stimulate pledge development, while regime instability may disincentivise pledge making. Focusing on Ukraine, a country that has been in the throes of political changes since the 1990s, Chaisty and Chernykh analyse the effects of both electoral competition and political instability on the number and nature of electoral pledges. Using a dataset of 45 election manifestoes containing over 2,5000 statements they find that while electoral competition has both increased the number of political pledges and transformed their nature, regime-level instability has only had a short term impact on political programme development in Ukraine.