Authors:
Tetiana Kostiuchenko | National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy | Ukraine
Inna Melnykovska | Harvard University | United States
Ukrainian big business has preserved its influence in Ukraine’s politics despite the political turmoil of the democratic breakthroughs and reverse autocratic trends. Recent studies demonstrate that the core of Ukrainian oligarchs has remained stable and that their strategies to exert political influence have stayed on largely unchanged (e.g., Pleines 2016). Still, it does not mean that the model of business-state relations remained static. We argue that in reaction to political turbulence and changes in the institutional setting of Ukraine’s political regime, Ukrainian big business continuously adjusted its ties to the main political actors within the repeatedly revised polity and dynamic political processes. We suggest approaching business-state relations as a network of mutually beneficial symbiosis. By contrast, contemporary research approaches these relations in terms of power asymmetry. It is either state capture, when power asymmetry runs to the benefit of business elites at the expense of political elites, or state dominance, when business-state model is dominated by political elites. However and despite this rivalry, business and political elites also operate in a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Access to state institutions and political power enables business elites to secure their economic interests and make money, which they then use to broaden their political power. In turn, political elites profit from business funding of election campaigns and from ‘administrative rent’ and ‘kickbacks’(otkaty). A symbiosis of politics and business often involves more than just a simple connection of patronage. Besides lobbying, and bribing to influence politics, business elites aim at assimilating the political elite, while political elites often start their own businesses. The assimilation of business elites in politics and vice versa is a common phenomenon. Moreover, the approach of power asymmetry has its methodological weakness. The concept of power asymmetry cannot operationalize the scope of (i.e. identify the extent to which the incumbent/big business is subject to ‘capture’) and threshold between state and business capture (i.e. identify a measurement threshold where business capture ends and state capture starts, or vice versa). Using the method of social network analysis, we demonstrate how the political – formal and informal – ties of Ukrainian big business to the different branches of state power evolved and what models of state-business relations developed from president to president. The analysis covers the period of 1998-2017 and contains the comparison of the relational structures of political and business elites in Ukraine during 4 presidencies and 5 parliament terms from the angles of actors' common past (biographical ties) and common policy-making activities (co-authorship in draft-laws). We trace not only the visibility of various big business cliques within political institutions during last 20 years, but also track changes in business-state relations through influential persons, positions, groups and network structures. Therefore, we suggest the network explanation of the stability of business-state symbiosis in Ukraine as well as model its development for the future considering the internal and external factors