Class Voting and the Orange Revolution: A Cultural Political Economy Perspective on Ukraine's Electoral Geography

The coloured revolutions in the post-communist countries are widely regarded as bourgeois democratic breakthroughs in a classical liberal tradition. Statistical analysis of the structural side of the Orange electoral success in Ukraine – examining in a range of regions the effect on electoral support for an anti-regime candidate of a district's class composition, the activity of non-governmental organizations, ethic-linguistic characteristics, the prevailing mode of human settlement, the church influence, and economic links with Europe – shows the class composition of an electoral district to be the single most important factor behind Viktor Yushchenko's electoral success. However, the Orange victory in 2004 was achieved with support from the least bourgeois areas rather than those where the urban capitalist class had been the most developed.