The Regional Factor in Contemporary Ukrainian Politics: Scale, Place, Space or Bogus Effect?1

Science Foundation. Special thanks are due to my research assistant, Altinay Kuchukeeva, for her care in the retrieval of the Ukrainian electoral data and her cartographic diligence. As always, Jim Robb of the Geography Department’s Cartographic Services Laboratory went far beyond expectations in preparing the figures for publication. 1 Post-independence Ukraine continues to be the subject of intense interest about its regional political divisions and ethnic/language tensions. The debate between the school arguing that regional cleavages are ebbing and thatwhich holds that Ukraine has not yet become a political community, is also fundamentally a geographic question regarding scale and place. Using two measures of political preferences, votes in the 1999 Presidential runoff election and the political attitudes expressed in 1992 and 1996 Eurobarometer surveys, the regional effect in Ukraine is shown to be complicated by the nature of the political question and by local disparities from regional trends. New methods of analysis and graphical display of statistical results clarify these complications and challenge both schools of researchers to pay heed to issues of measurement, technique and geographic issues of scal