UkraineWorld

Yevhen Golovakha – for UkraineWorld

 The Director of the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine, Corresponding Member of the NAS of Ukraine, Doctor of Sociological Sciences, Professor Yevhen Golovakha was invited as an expert by the UkraineWorld project.

 This is an English-language multimedia project about Ukraine run by Internews Ukraine. The UkraineWorld project grew out of a volunteer initiative to help international journalists during the Euromaidan of 2013–2014. Today it operates thanks to the support of Internews Network (the U-Media programme funded by USAID), the International Renaissance Foundation, the Ukrainian Institute, the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, the NATO Centre in Ukraine and other donors.

 UkraineWorld's experts have been quoted by such high-profile foreign media as The New York Times, the Financial Times, Le Monde, the Atlantic Council, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and FRANCE 24.

 This time that expert was Yevhen Golovakha.

 UkraineWorld's editors were interested in four questions. Answering the first of them – on Ukrainians' subjective perception of economic achievements – the head of the Institute replied: «In 2022 and 2023 the share of Ukrainians who assess the country's economic development positively was almost twice as large as in 2021. And that despite the fact that the war clearly had a destructive effect on the economy». On this question the sociologist singled out five aspects:

• Before Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukrainians took a negative view of what was happening in the country. Combined with a low standard of living, this led Ukrainians to underestimate the level of development of the Ukrainian economy. Ukrainians assessed the state of their economy as one of the most negative in the whole of Europe. Yet the state of the economy was not bad, since it provided a more or less decent life for the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians.

• Although in 1990 there really were many citizens on the edge of survival, on the eve of the full-scale war that number had shrunk to about 20% of Ukraine's population. That is, since independence a real shift for the better had taken place in the economy, but since Ukrainians underestimated the economy a paradox emerged: the subjective perception of economic achievements in Ukraine did not depend on the real state of the economy.

• With the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainians saw that their country is strong, capable of withstanding a hostile neighbour, and that it managed to keep the economy afloat despite losing a third of GDP.

• Countries at war face serious economic difficulties even before rationing is introduced. In Ukraine, however, that did not happen. So two factors contributed to such sociological results – a rise in respect for the state and the recognition that the Ukrainian state is not so weak after all if it has withstood a war.

• And we may predict that new battlefield victories will raise the public perception of the Ukrainian economy.

Answering the second question – on the difference between ideological and political affiliation – the scholar emphasised two aspects:

• 43% – and these are people mainly with a low level of education, residents of small towns – are the respondents who remained undetermined on the question of ideological affiliation. There is an interesting phenomenon, however: when we look at how these people vote, the specifics of the voting of those who identify themselves ideologically do not differ substantially from those 43% of respondents who said they were unfamiliar with the question of ideological self-identification. That is, there is no chaos. We know that people with a low level of education more often vote for communists and nationalists, that is, for extreme positions, but there are no substantial differences in voting between those who have defined their ideological affiliation and those who have not. The division of a refined ideological space may be harder to grasp, but it has no bearing on their electoral preferences.

• In addition, psychologists have demonstrated that people without higher education understand the world they live in better than people with knowledge but without practical skills.

Answering the third question – on cynicism and transaction costs – the professor stressed:

• According to the test of social cynicism, people are suspicious of others and believe that others may act dishonestly for their own gain. Cynicism presupposes a lack of belief in people's honesty. The phenomenon of the amoral majority exists not because there is an amoral majority in the country but because people create this conception of those to be wary of intersubjectively, and this phenomenon is extremely hard to grasp.

• It is common knowledge that the lower the level of social cynicism, the higher the level of development will be. Given that when you distrust someone in advance you incur transaction costs — that is, you factor potential losses into the calculation of your behaviour, which hampers decision-making. With the beginning of the war the level of social cynicism fell considerably.

Commenting on the fourth question, put by Daria Synhaievska – are there threats to democracy in post-war Ukraine? – UkraineWorld's analyst Golovakha noted optimistically:

• For Ukrainians, tradition means an attempt to find some roots in the past in order to survive in the present. Ukrainians therefore turn to Cossack democracy and to the struggle against conquerors in order to learn how to fight occupiers. The only threat to democracy in post-war Ukraine is a Russian victory. But historically Ukraine has resisted authoritarian tendencies, which are not characteristic of Ukrainians.

On the whole, UkraineWorld's engagement of the leader of Ukrainian sociology as an expert means in effect that the achievements and research of Ukraine's academic sociologists will be spread across practically the whole world through such high-profile foreign media as The New York Times, the Financial Times, Le Monde, the Atlantic Council, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, FRANCE 24 and others.