“What Makes Democracies Resilient in the Face of Authoritarianism? The case of Wartime Ukraine”

The lecture addresses the social factors that ensure the resilience of democracy, enabling it to resist authoritarian tendencies and recover from adverse influences. We define resilience as a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing the institutional and social quality of democracy, which links the impact of political stress (events and processes) on the regime with the capacity of democracy to resist authoritarian tendencies and even to strengthen in the face of extremely unfavorable challenges. Relevant hereby are the institutional quality of democracy, the normative and procedural framework for regime functioning, and the social quality, the capacity for democratic functioning through its deep roots in value consciousness, social structure, and civic practices. The focus is on (pre-)wartime Ukraine, analyzed from a comparative perspective that includes (1) more stable democracies (Britain, Germany, and Lithuania) and (2) post-Soviet autocracies (Russia and Belarus). The study is grounded in socio-spatial and agency-structural theoretical approaches; the empirical analysis utilizes the integrated EVS and WVS databases, and data from an all-Ukrainian sociological survey during the war.