ABSTRACT

This article investigates and compares how people in diverse peripheral regions of Ukraine understood democracy, their role as citizens in a democracy, and the meaning of “good citizenship” in 2021, the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion. We conduct thematic analysis of focus group discussions to demonstrate gaps and inconsistencies in the understandings of democracy articulated by our participants. We find that a utopian understanding of democracy is common, in which authorities are expected to “listen to the people” and keep them satisfied, but the need for government to manage conflicting interests is not recognized. Understandings of good citizenship are inclusive and pro-social, but mostly detached from institutional politics. We observe similarity across regions in how democracy is understood in the abstract. However, the meaning ascribed to democracy often varied when discussion moved from the abstract to particular country examples – a finding relevant beyond the Ukrainian case, for survey-based research on public understandings of democracy more generally.

摘要

本文调查并比较了乌克兰不同外围地区的人们如何理解民主、他们在民主中作为公民的角色，以及在俄罗斯全面入侵前一年的 2021 年“良好公民”的含义。我们对焦点小组讨论进行主题分析，以证明我们的参与者对民主的理解存在差距和不一致。我们发现，对民主的乌托邦式理解很普遍，其中期望当局“倾听人民的意见”并让他们满意，但政府管理冲突利益的必要性并未得到承认。对良好公民的理解具有包容性和亲社会性，但大多与制度政治脱节。我们观察到不同地区在抽象理解民主方面的相似性。然而，