Democratic Revolutions from a Different Angle: Social Populism and National Identity in Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution

This article discusses the three factors that lay behind democratic revolutions by adding two new facilitators, social populism and nationalism (in addition to election fraud), to our understanding of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

Most scholarly studies of this seminal event in contemporary Ukrainian history have focused on protests against election fraud while ignoring these two important factors. Scholars who have placed the struggle for democratic rights in post-communist states in the forefront of their analysis within a ‘transitology paradigm’ have argued that a ‘fourth wave’ of democratisation in the post-communist world took place in two stages, 1989–1991 and from 1996–2004.

This article argues that placing Ukraine together with other Central-Eastern countries in the second stage ignores the different role played by social populism and nationalism in mobilizing protestors in Ukraine, two factors that played a far smaller or non-existent role in Central-Eastern Europe.