Peer-reviewed articles Electoral effects of the tomos

To what extent did Poroshenko’s efforts in creating an independent and canonical Orthodox church translate into national electoral support? A survey conducted before the first round of elections and a dataset of parish transitions to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) are employed to address this question. The data suggest that the Tomos did increase support for Poroshenko. However, this effect was small. Drawing on the literature in micro-to-macro transition, I propose the hypothesis that actual transitions of parishes at the level of precincts were a necessary condition to ensure a link from the general support for the Tomos to electoral support for Poroshenko.

Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2020:2-3, pp 84-91
Published on balticworlds.com on October 8, 2020

abstract

To what extent did Poroshenko’s efforts in creating an independent and canonical Orthodox church translate into national electoral support? A survey conducted before the first round of elections and a dataset of parish transitions to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) are employed to address this question. The data suggest that the Tomos did increase support for Poroshenko. However, this effect was small. Drawing on the literature in micro-to-macro transition, I propose the hypothesis that actual transitions of parishes at the level of precincts were a necessary condition to ensure a link from the general support for the Tomos to electoral support for Poroshenko.

Keywords: Poroshenko, Tomos, Ukraine, Orthohodox Church, electoral support

Ukraine has been under the spotlight for last couple of years. The ongoing conflict with Russia, recent elections, and the US impeachment sparked interest in Ukraine among media and experts. A significant portion of this attention was received by the new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky who won 73% votes in the second round of the election in April 21, 2019, defeating the incumbent candidate Petro Poroshenko. His surprising victory was as intriguing as Poroshenko’s overwhelming defeat. Usually, pundits explain Poroshenko’s debacle with many variables including his failures to deliver some key policies and a misleading campaign. This article is focused on the latter. His campaign was biased towards national identities and stressed the importance of the independent autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). The slogan “Army, Language, Faith” serves as an eloquent illustration of this point. Moreover, Poroshenko took a lot of credit for the success of the Tomos — the official document that grants canonical independence to the OCU. His emphasis on this issue during the campaign was even given the nickname “Tomos Tour”. At the same time, the idea of the OCU became more popular among Ukrainians. Therefore, a question begs for an answer, as Jose Casanova puts it: “Why didn’t Petro Poroshenko’s direct — and popular — effort in attaining the Tomos translate into electoral support?”. However, this question is misleading as I will show, backed up with data. In fact, the Tomos did increase support for Poroshenko. However, the effect was small. The data at individual level (surveys) show that increased support for the OCU correlated with greater support for Poroshenko. Moreover, the data of transitions of parishes (from the Moscow Patriarchate to the OCU) also shows more support for Poroshenko at those precincts where a transition happened. Drawing on the literature in political sociology and the micro-to-macro transition, I propose the hypothesis that competition between Orthodox jurisdictions was a necessary condition to ensure a link from the Tomos to electoral support for Poroshenko.

The role of religion in Ukrainian politics

Considering Poroshenko’s campaign, researchers pointed out that it engaged with national narratives and identity politics featuring slogans of “Army, Faith, Language” and promoting the Tomos. The term identity politics is quite broad and is typically reserved by Western scholars and activists for political representation based on religion, race, or social background instead of party affiliation or ideological disputes. It is also used for disadvantaged or even threatened social groups in their struggle for social equality or representation (e.g., people of color, LGBTQ, women). In Ukraine scholars use the term identity politics when they study national and local policies or public communication about state symbols, historical narratives, and national heroes. Language and religion are also a part of identity politics to the extent they are connected with state and national symbols. Poroshenko’s efforts to exploit identity politics were a continuation of the long-established trope of appealing to national issues in Ukrainian political campaigns. Since early studies in the 1990s and 2000s, scholars have consistently registered that religion is deeply connected with Ukrainians’ electoral preferences. As Yelensky pointed out, since the late 1990s followers of the UOC-MP were more likely to vote for anti-Western and pro-Russian parties such as the communists and the Progressive Socialists. Moreover, the church has become one of the most trusted institutions in the eyes of Ukrainians with a growing influence on civil society in Ukraine, while also being increasingly present in public speeches of Ukrainian politicians. Historically, this process of increasing influence in the secular and public domains was connected with the leading role of the church in the process of national-state building.

One of the signature features of Ukrainian religious life has been its pluralism. From the early 1990s till 2018, the Orthodox church in Ukraine co-existed with the Greek Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church, various Evangelical and Protestant churches, and smaller groups of Muslims and Jews. Moreover, the mainstream Orthodox church was split in three jurisdictions: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate (UOC–MP), the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyivan Patriarchate (UOC–KP), and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC). In different years and in different regions, this competition sometimes manifested in confrontations. This complex and plural configuration was institutionalized with the formation in 1996 of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations (ACCRO), which also played a very active role during the Euromaidan in 2014. Thus, religious pluralism has been tied with Ukrainian public and political spheres for a long time. It is worth mentioning that active competition between Orthodox jurisdictions contributed significantly to growing religious identities of Ukrainians.

Therefore, Poroshenko’s attempt to win voters’ hearts with national and religious narratives was quite logical, given the whole history of religious revivals in Ukraine, the connection between religion and national state building, and previous electoral history. A careful investigation of his campaign by Denys Shestopalets showed that basic ideas in Poroshenko’s public statements were previously expressed by former President Viktor Yushchenko and by the founder of the UOC-KP, Patriarch Filaret. Interestingly, this research shows that Poroshenko’s statements about the Orthodox church can be divided in two distinct periods: before and after April 2018. Initially, his rhetoric was calm and neutral; then he started framing autocephaly as not a religious but a political issue. He connected the political independence of Ukraine with the autocephalous status of the Orthodox church, while also arguing that autocephaly would be an important protection against Moscow’s influence.

Since Ukrainian politicians do not have the authority to grant any Orthodox church its independence and autocephaly, it was Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople who signed the Tomos in 2019. The role of Poroshenko and his team in this process was pivotal. They made a lot of diplomatic efforts to convince Bartholomew and Ukrainian political elites that the OCU had to be organized. Moreover, Poroshenko played a critical role in convincing Filaret (head of the Kyivan Patriarchate at the time) to step aside from a competition for the leadership of the OCU and to pass this appointment to Archbishop Epiphanes. Nevertheless, it was also a convenient historical moment shaped by the changing power dynamics within global orthodoxy, which pushed the Ecumenical Patriarch to reclaim his canonical primacy over the Metropolinate of Kyiv, against the competing claims of the Moscow Patriarchate. Moreover, after the Russian annexation of Crimea as well as Russian involvement in the conflict in Donbas, Ukrainian political elites and intellectuals were inclined to work towards the unification of Ukrainian orthodoxy in a new autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian nation reacted quite positively to the idea of a new independent Orthodox church. Polls showed that 43.9% of all Orthodox respondents supported the OCU. Another 15.2% claimed affiliation with the Moscow Patriarchate, and quite a large proportion, 38.4%, claimed to be “simply Orthodox”. At the same time, previous studies showed that ordinary non-MP Orthodox Ukrainians also displayed nationalistic preferences (in terms of language usage or voting for more pro-Ukrainian parties). Therefore, it was natural to expect that such national support for the Tomos would have a significant effect on electoral support for Poroshenko. Yet, Petro Poroshenko lost significantly. Perhaps his defeat was the reason why researchers by default dismissed religion as an important variable in their studies. For instance, exit polls and representative surveys were mostly focused on such variables as region, age, gender, education, and ignored religion altogether. Thus, there was little study of the actual influence of religious preferences. Many published polling data or analyses by pundits and researchers entirely omitted the variable of religion. Yet, many have taken for granted that religion did not play any role in the elections. However, the simple fact that Poroshenko lost does not mean that religion did not play a role. I will briefly investigate and discuss this issue in this article. The empirical part of this article is focused on some descriptive statistics to navigate future discussions. More research could be done in future with possible additional control variables and inferential models.

Survey data evidence

From March 7^th to March 17^th, 2019 a polling agency, Vox Populi, conducted a relatively small national survey on behalf of the analytical think-tank Vox Ukraine. The fieldwork was supported by the International Renaissance Foundation as a part of the project “Ukrainians on the Political Compass”. The size of the sample is 1,200 with an error margin of no more than 3%. This survey is representative of the urban and rural population of Ukraine. Although the main focus of this survey was political ideology, it also included a question about religious affiliation. Despite the relatively small size of the sample, it was comparable with other larger polls regarding the electoral predictions (Table 1).

Table 1.

If the presidential elections were held next Sunday and the following candidates were presented, who would you vote for?

	Vox Populi, March 7-17, 2019, N=1,200	KIIS, March 20-26, 2019, N=1,600	Rating, March 22-27, 2019, N=3,000	Central Election Commission of Ukraine, Official results, March 31, 2019
Volodymyr Zelensky	21.3%	17.8%	20.6%	30.24%
Petro Poroshenko	13.2%	11.7%	12.9%	15.95%
Yulia Tymoshenko	11.6%	8.3%	13%	13.4%
Yurii Boiko	7.3%	7.1%	7.4%	11.67%
Anatolii Hrytsenko	6.5%	5.4%	7.4%	6.91%

Who supported the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine? In the Vox Populi data which we analyzed the distribution of religious groups was the following (Table 2). In the same vein to reviewed polls and research, most of our respondents belong to Orthodox church with no partitions (34 percent) and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (22 percent).

Table 2.

Religious affiliation (n=1,200)

Religious group	Percentage
Orthodox with no partition	34%
Orthodox Church of Ukraine	22%
Moscow patriarchate	16%
Greek Catholics	10%
Atheists	10%
All other answers	8%

Looking at the regional distribution of OCU supporters, they were mostly concentrated in Center, Western, and Northern Ukraine. They had much smaller representation in the East and South when compared to all other religious groups. They were quite similar to all other religious groups in terms of basic demographics such as age and gender.; i.e. mean age of 47-48 with mostly women, 56%-58% respectively. In contrast, a group of Ukrainians atheists comprises a younger and mostly male population.

Table 3.

Socio-demographic profile by religious groups

Religious group	Orthodox Church of Ukraine (N=266)	All other religious groups (N=811)	Atheists (N=123)
Men	44%	42%	68%
Women	56%	58%	32%
Mean age	48	47	41
East	6%	14%	29%
South	11%	16%	20%
North	17%	12%	10%
Center	34%	25%	24%
Kyiv	4%	7%	12%
West	28%	26%	5%
Total	100%	100%	100%

How did they support political candidates? Table 4 shows the top 5 choices of respondents by religious affiliation. There is a clear tendency that Ukrainians who identified with the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine supported Poroshenko far more than any other group. They also showed less support for Zelensky. Notably, their support for Hrytsenko was quite small, even though he was a popular candidate in some Western Ukraine cities. Thus, one could argue that religion was a stronger predictor for swing voters between Poroshenko and Hrytsenko than region.

Table 4.

Top 5 candidates by religious groups

Religious group	Orthodox Church of Ukraine (N=266)	All other religious groups (N=811)	Atheists (N=123)	All (1200)
Petro Poroshenko	24%	11%	6%	13%
Volodymyr Zelensky	17%	22%	26%	21%
Yulia Tymoshenko	14%	12%	4%	12%
Hard to say, undecided	13%	15%	17%	15%
Anatolii Hrytsenko	7%	7%	2%	7%

The same variables presented above can be utilized in a simple logistic regression model for the simple purpose of testing the significance of their effects. More thorough investigation needs to be done if one would like to model which variables can predict voting for Poroshenko. A better model should include more contextual variables and be more theoretically driven. Table 5 presents a series of simple models just to recapitulate the discussion about the socio-demographic profile and religiosity of respondents.

These models include the following variables: log of age; gender (man = 1, women = 0), language (Ukrainian = 1, all other languages = 0); region (combined “East and South”, combined “North and Center”, West, Kyiv); religion (the OCU, all other religious groups, atheists). The dependent variable is the probability of voting for Poroshenko if the elections were next Sunday.

In line with what was already discussed above, both “other religious groups” and atheists tend to show less support for Poroshenko than the supporters of the OCU (reference category). East/South regions (reference category) also tend to show less support for Poroshenko when compared to North/Center and Western regions. Men and Ukrainian speakers tend to have higher support for Poroshenko than women and people with other language preferences (including the mix of Russian and Ukrainian) respectively, whereas age does not play a significant role.

Table 5.

Probability of voting for Poroshenko and basic socio-demographic variables

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
Intercept	-1.83 (0.80)*	-3.96 (0.81)***	-3.82 (0.88)***
Religion (reference – OCU)
Other religious groups	-0.89 (0.17) ***		-0.77 (0.17)***
Atheists	-1.60 (0.37) ***		-1.13 (0.39)**
Region (reference – East/South)
Kyiv		0.56 (0.41)	0.42 (0.42)
North/Center		1.15 (0.24) ***	0.64 (0.25)*
West		1.60 (0.25) ***	0.94 (0.27)***
Male			0.36 (0.16)*
Ukrainian language			1.06 (0.25)***
Log of age	0.25 (0.20)	0.35 (0.21)	0.32 (0.21)
AIC	1,053	1,040	999

Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

For the sake of illustration, Figure 1 plots predicted probabilities for Model 1 and Model 2, respectively. These figures also plot confidence intervals for each estimate. In case of Model 2 (image to the right) one can see that confidence intervals of some regions overlap significantly, thus the role of regions in predicting the probability of Poroshenko’s support is not so salient. The difference between Western and Eastern/Southern regions is salient, while differences between other regions are not clear. In contrast, Model 1 shows quite a salient difference between the OCU supporters and everyone else. All in all, the role of religion seems to be more salient vis-a-vis the role of regions. However, more investigation is needed to include other variables as well.

 

Contextual data of religious transfers

Ukraine has witnessed a considerable amount of church competition between the Orthodox jurisdictions. Comparative sociological literature on church competition makes a strong case that in a competitive environment, religious actors are more active, i.e. they adapt to the needs of their congregations. Consequently, people tend to be more loyal and active participants of religious communities. Moreover, when church competition is present, religious organizations simply cater to more specific niches, which again maximizes the number of religious participants in a given territory.

In the Ukrainian context, the Tomos cannot be separated from the process of church competition. At the national level, clergy, intellectual and political elites championed structural changes to the Orthodox church in Ukraine, arguing that all jurisdictions must join one single autocephalous church. This idea caused a series of protests and public debates, since not all religious and political groups agreed to the change. To date, there is no research on the actual motivation of those parishes that changed their affiliation from the Moscow Patriarchate to the OUC. Their commitment to the Tomos may have had different reasons. The transition could have been promoted by local priests or by community members themselves. The support of local political activists could also have played some role. Regardless the motivation and key actors, in the end some communities were exposed to the process of religious transformation. Did this exposure have any effect on electoral outcomes? This question can be analyzed with the data from the precincts.

For this exercise, I refer to the data on the transition of parishes from the Moscow Patriarchate to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. A map of such transitions was published online and has been used by the research community. These data should be treated carefully. They are based on media and sometimes self-made reports by the local activists. They may include both transitions and attempted transitions as well as ongoing transitions. Also, a few transitions were registered after the elections. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this article, I treat these data as a signal of church competition and exposure to religious change.

These data of religious transitions are merged with the data on electoral results for the second round of elections at the level of precincts. Overall, there are 510 cases of transition in the final dataset (Table 6). 510 is a relatively small number. In total, the dataset has 29,965 observations (excluding foreign electoral precincts).

Table 6.

Transitions from the Moscow Patriarchate to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine

Region	City	Village/Small town
East	1	6
South	1	14
North	0	81
Center	1	167
West	0	237
Kyiv	2	–

In terms of precincts, the dataset includes only 1.7% of such places where a church made a transition (in a village or in a city nearby the precinct). Yet, a closer look at these few cases can reveal something interesting. Figure 2 plots the total number of transitioned churches (x-axis) and the average vote for Poroshenko (y-axis) for each oblast. Oblasts are classified by regions and marked on a plot with colors and shapes.

 

Figure 2 shows that the correlation at the level of oblasts is quite modest. The West and Kyiv gave Poroshenko a lot of votes regardless of the number of transitions. However, other regions display an interesting pattern. Moving from East to South and then to North and Center, we see more support for Poroshenko in oblasts with more transitions.

This pattern is better seen at the level of precincts. Please note that in some regions, the number of transitions was very small (back to Table 6). Nevertheless, it is interesting to compare a few villages where the Tomos was taken seriously against other local territories (Figure 3).

 

Figure 3 shows the support for Poroshenko in each region in places where transition did not happen versus places where transition happened. In all regions except Western Ukraine, the pattern is the same — places with the effect of the Tomos displayed higher levels of support for Poroshenko. Western Ukraine gave a lot of voices to Poroshenko in all precincts, regardless of religious transition.

A few simple observations from the data:

Local territories (especially villages) that supported Poroshenko were also engaged in the Tomos.

The data does not show causality. However, it is clear that the Tomos and support for Poroshenko were linked, especially in small villages. This connection was seen in all regions, especially in the North and Center. Western Ukraine was the exception. Most likely the effect of the Tomos there was redundant since the local population already supported Poroshenko.

Summary and implications

After Poroshenko lost the 2019 elections, some experts argued that his emphasis on identity politics and the Tomos during the campaign was a mistake because this message did not resonate with Ukrainians. At the same time, researchers observed that the Ukrainian population largely supported the idea of the Tomos and the UOC. Moreover, extensive sociological scholarship has long argued that religion is a crucial component of the Ukrainian political process. Thus, a conundrum was posed: how come such popular efforts in attaining the Tomos did not translate into electoral support? The assumption that the Tomos did not pay off for Poroshenko seems to be based on a simple observation that he lost. However, this does not mean that there was no effect at all. Surprisingly, to date there was no systematic empirical effort to evaluate the effect of the Tomos on elections: was it absent alltogether, was it restricted to some particular groups of people, or was it constrained by some structural conditions?

In this article I addressed this issue and employed two datasets: (1) a survey conducted before the first round of elections; (2) a merged dataset of church transitions (from the Moscow Patriarchate to the UOC) at the level of villages/cities with the electoral results at the level of precincts. The data show that the Tomos and the UOC did influence electoral preferences and electoral behavior. The survey dataset confirms that people who identified with the UCO also supported Poroshenko. Thus, religious preferences did play a role in shaping electoral attitudes. According to the second database, those places where churches changed their affiliation from the Moscow patriarchate to the UOC also showed higher support for Poroshenko (especially in central Ukraine).

The main implication of these findings is that the Tomos did play some role. It would be wrong to say that it did not. However, the effect was small and was limited to a small number of places where religious transition actually happened. Therefore, researchers could ask new empirical questions to explore the role of religion further: (1) Why did transitions happen in these particular places? Is there any omitted variable that can explain both religious transition and the support for Poroshenko in these villages/cities? (2) What was the mechanism that channeled people’s religious preferences into electoral support for Poroshenko?

Possible answers to this question can be derived from the literature in political sociology and social movements as well as the broader theoretical literature on micro-to-macro transitions. The first stream of the literature is occupied with the big question of how people are mobilized for collective action (such as voting). This literature is vast and points to the importance of social background, grievances, resources, media, political campaigns, and opportunities for mobilization. The takeaway point here is that there could be a small group of people with stronger preferences for certain ideologies, religious worldviews, and political candidates. It is likely that this particular group of people found Poroshenko’s campaign appealing. Therefore, the Tomos did translate into electoral support, but the size of the group was small and not enough to bring victory. Still, this is not the same as saying that there was no effect at all.

Another line of literature is rather broad and points to the fact that both individual agency and social structures must be considered. Although this framework is popularized in sociology under the label of analytical sociology, it is also quite common in social movement studies. According to this theory, a change at the macro level (e.g. a link from the Tomos to Poroshenko’s electoral success ) requires specific opportunities and incentives for people to behave in a certain way, and that their behavior should be mediated by structural and institutional conditions. In simple words, in some cases support for the Tomos did boost support for Poroshenko, and in some places it did not. To give an example, perhaps there were not enough structural opportunities for people who supported the Tomos also to vote for Poroshenko. For example, imagine a scenario where for some reason Poroshenko did not campaign strongly in a region inhabited by pro-Tomos Ukrainians while campaigning in those places where people did not care much about the Tomos. Such a mismatch clearly constrains incentives of potential supporters to actually vote for Poroshenko while not offering any strong incentive to his opponents. Another example could be if local priests decided to oppose the Tomos. In this scenario, the local population that supported Poroshenko did not feel that their religious preferences were catered for, which discouraged them from voting for their candidate.

In all these scenarios, personal preferences that are manifested in surveys are clearly not enough to produce electoral support. These preferences should be channeled at the level of precincts with favorable incentives. Therefore, religious preferences for the UOC should interact with electoral preferences and also meet actual change at the structural level (church transition). My data analysis is indicative that when people have already strong electoral support for Poroshenko, then the additional effect of religion is not significant (i.e. Western Ukraine on Figure 3). However, when people live in other regions with lower support for Poroshenko and their personal preferences match with structural changes, then their preferences are more likely to be transformed in electoral support.

Caveats and prospects for further research

My analysis, of course, is limited to simple descriptive exercises. Moreover, my final propositions are drawn on the literature and my interpretation of the descriptive statistics. Such analysis is at risk of omitting confounding effects. For example, one could argue that the observed patterns could be partially explained by social capital and peer pressure, i.e. people in smaller villages coordinate better in deciding on local agendas, including which church to support or whom to vote for. More robust hypothesis testing is necessary to advance this research agenda. ≈

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to the team of VoxUkraine for their work on creating the Political Compass of Ukrainians and allowing me to use their data for the analysis. The data were collected with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation. The fieldwork was executed by a polling company, Vox Populi. The original data and supplementary materials can be accessed here: https://bit.ly/UkrainePreelections2019

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Tymofii Brik