Anastasiia Vlasenko is Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Ukrainian Studies and a lecturer in political science.

Can you tell us a bit about your background? How did your personal trajectory inform and influence your professional trajectory?

I grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine. My school, which I attended for 11 years, was located in the governmental district. Every day, I passed the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) and the President’s administration on my way to school. I saw people wearing suits rushing to their offices and wondered what they actually did. Today, this period of Ukrainian independence is associated with Leonid Kuchma’s regime, known for its persecution of journalists and widespread corruption. This harsh political reality leaked into my life and the lives of the children around me. When the riot police, Berkut, were stationed in my school during the Orange Revolution of 2004, my friends and I had no other option but to miss school and join the mass protests on Maidan. I was fourteen back then, and I had no idea what I wanted to research when I got to college a few years later, but I knew that studying Ukrainian politics would be my calling.

How did you become interested in electoral politics and democratization in Ukraine?

At first, I was much more interested in the European integration of Ukraine (hence, I got an MSc in European Affairs from Lund University) and Russia’s coercive diplomacy (which led to an MA in International Relations from New York University). However, as I was working on my second master’s thesis, it became clear that most questions I asked in my research were directly linked to democratization and its reflection in electoral outcomes. This change in my research agenda prompted me to focus on Comparative Politics, more specifically on the development and decline of democratic institutions.

Can you tell us briefly about your research on legislative networks in Ukraine?

I study how legislative networks in the Ukrainian parliament affect corruption, political survival, and law-making activities. In addition to conventional party and faction ties, Ukrainian legislators tend to form networks through unelected parliamentary staff and personal legislative assistants serve as human links between members of parliament. My research suggests that a higher number of legislative ties within such networks is associated with the number of bribes and other illegitimate financial benefits the legislators are able to extract during their tenure; better chances of reelection; and higher frequency of legislative co-sponsorship. I argue that this effect exists due to the proliferation of clientelist relations aided by Ukrainian oligarchs. My study implies that rent-seeking and vote-buying behavior is made possible by low levels of accountability and transparency, which are typical for countries with young democratic institutions.

What have been the most significant challenges and/or changes to your work since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has created challenges due to its impact on the political landscape, data availability, and research relevance. First, legislative networks in Ukraine experienced tremendous shock after the invasion when typical political cleavages of Ukrainian politics lost their significance and were substituted with war-related agendas. The latter created a unique political landscape, in which ideology and traditional left-right divides play a minor role. The preexisting supermajority in Ukraine’s parliament facilitated this process. As a result, unlike its predecessors, the wartime Ukrainian parliament is characterized by a higher level of unity, making it harder to investigate hidden legislative networks.

Second, data availability has become much more limited. Before the full-scale invasion, multiple NGOs, think tanks, and international organizations contributed considerable financial and human resources to improve the transparency of Ukrainian politics. As a result, the average Internet user had free access to all essential information about Ukrainian politicians, including detailed and frequently-updated data on their staff, tax declarations, property, voting behavior, etc. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, a lot of these datasets were closed to the public either due to security considerations or lack of human resources, which were redirected to war-related efforts.

Third, the most important question right now is how ongoing scholarship on Ukrainian politics may affect the ability of Ukrainians to stay resilient and keep fighting. As a result, some current research requires reframing, additional data collection, and sometimes the general reconsideration of research questions. While it is important to keep research relevant, it is also important not to omit the study of the topics that might seem “less important” after 2022, but still contribute to our understanding of Ukrainian democratization. Finding that fine balance between war-time relevancy and research continuity can be quite challenging.

What will you be working on at the Harriman Institute?

I will be continuing my research project on legislative networks in Ukraine and their impact on clientelism and lawmaking. In Ukraine, a country with young democratic institutions and an uncertain political environment, it is difficult and unreliable to try and predict future changes in political networks. This uncertainty can motivate elites to form permanent alliances of their own. Instead of relying on those who are currently in power, politicians might be interested in cooperating with a small circle of relatives, friends, and political allies who remain loyal irrespective of power shifts. Such alliances do not require strong partisanship or loyalty since they are created and maintained not formally through party discipline but through informally operating networks. The logical question follows: how do informal networks affect politicians’ behavior?

I argue that these informal networks explain the logic of legislative behavior in developing states that do not have either a strong or stable ruling party. More specifically, cooperation within such networks defines legislators’ involvement in corruption schemes, their chances of reelection, and bill co-sponsorship. I offer a new way of revealing the hidden informal parliamentary networks by using the employment records of legislative assistants to establish links between legislators. These unelected parliamentary staff, who often work for different legislators in consecutive convocations, can connect politicians from different sides of the ideological spectrum without attracting public attention and, thus, benefiting from the lack of transparency. I study how the connective thread between legislative assistants and members of parliament can help explain corruption, political survival, and law-making activities.

Can you tell us about the course you’ll be teaching this fall?

I will be teaching an upper-level undergraduate comparative politics course on the government and politics of Ukraine. This course applies the basic concepts of comparative political science to Ukraine’s political system. It provides an in-depth examination of the political system, institutions, and social dynamics in Ukraine. We will explore the historical, cultural, and geopolitical factors shaping Ukrainian politics, as well as key issues such as democratization, corruption, foreign policy, and the ongoing full-scale invasion. We will also analyze the role of Ukraine in the broader context of European politics and its relationship with Russia. The assigned readings cover theories of voting, party system development, political protests, transitions to democracy, and institutional change, among other topics. The main goal of this course is to help students develop theoretical tools for understanding political events and challenges in Ukraine. While this course covers some recent Ukrainian history, it also zooms out to use Ukraine as an example of the broader, more general issues that come along with democratization reforms. We will draw on readings from comparative political science, economics, and sociology to introduce students to the major debates on economic and political reforms.