Institutional change, power, and political executives in Ukraine under the Kuchma presidency

To assess how and why some institutions may be more efficient in promoting change without disrupting the initial institutional design, this article proposes to analyze the evolution of the power relationship between the political executive in the semipresidential regime of Ukraine under the presidency of Leonid Kuchma. The analysis of the power relationship between political executives in Ukraine reveals the hazard of understanding the political process solely through institutional lenses. The results show that in this consolidating democracy, executive power is often a function of non-institutional and partisan explanations, and that state weaknesses in its autonomy and capacity are core explanations, since it allows important societal divides, such as ethnic and regional affiliation, and network competition to polarize the political sphere and make political competition between political executives a zero-sum game