What Do Voters in Ukraine Want?: A Survey Experiment on Candidate Ethnicity, Language, and Policy Orientation

Abstract

Language, ethnicity, and policy orientation toward Europe are key cleavages in Ukrainian society, but there is much debate about their relative importance. Based on a survey experiment of 1000 residents of Ukraine that manipulated three features of a fictional candidate running for parliament, I find that a candidate’s ethnicity and language had little impact on reported vote choice, whereas economic policy orientation toward Europe was strongly associated with vote preference. Despite the intense politicization of both ethnicity and language and the violence in eastern Ukraine vote choice has not been reduced to an ethnic or linguistic census.

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