2024/04/16 by Mikhail A. Alexseev, Serhii Dembitskyi · 15 citations
Social Sciences · #Authoritarianism #Democracy #Development economics #European and Russian Geopolitical Military Strategies #Geopolitics #Law #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Pride #Public opinion #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Sociology #Sociopolitical Dynamics in Russia #Survey data collection
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s1537592724000422
published in Perspectives on Politics 22(4), 1077-1099 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2024/04/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/26
We examine why public support for democracy in Ukraine increased after Russia’s 2014 intervention and surged after Russia’s 2022 invasion—despite concerns that the wartime quest for security would diminish support for political freedoms. We statistically analyze original data generated as part of annual opinion surveys by the Institute of Sociology at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences in 2017 (N = 2,199), 2018 (N = 1,800), and a 2021–22 panel survey with the same respondents (N = 475) interviewed before and after Russia’s invasion. Our findings indicate that wartime support for democracy is in significant respects geosocietal —arising from the mobilization of civic national identity conditioned by salient geopolitical threats. Civic pride, attribution of threat to an external authoritarian aggressor, and war onset were the strongest and most robust predictors of multiple democracy support indicators, overriding personal loss and stress. The findings call for more attention to the interaction of geopolitical and social contexts shaping political attitudes, with implications for democratic futures globally.