What makes democracies resilient in the face of authoritarianism

Prof. Dr. Olga Kutsenko (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine, dzt. Visiting Professor Technische Universität Berlin)
Vortrag am Montag, 25.11.2024, 18.00 Uhr Ort: Seminarraum H10 der Univ. Wien, Rathausstraße 19/Stiege 2/ Hochparterre

Biographie – Olga Kutsenko

Olga Kutsenko, Prof. Dr., is a professor of Sociology at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine), and Vice-President of the Sociological Association of Ukraine. Since 2023, she has also held the prestigious Einstein Professorship in „Civic Activism as a Driving Force of Deliberative Democracy“ at the Technical University of Berlin. Her academic journey began with studies in political economy, philosophy, and sociology. In 2005, she founded the Chair of Political Sociology at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine) and later led the Chair of Social Structures and Social Relations and the PhD Program in Sociology at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. She has been a visiting professor and researcher at universities such as the University of Colorado, SUNY, Penn State (USA), Cambridge (UK), Berlin Technical University, Freie Universität Berlin, the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, and the OSI in Budapest and Warsaw. She has published and edited over 20 books and book chapters, as well as approximately 180 articles in national and international sociological journals.

Abstract

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, alongside data from an all-Ukrainian sociological survey conducted during the war.