title: The Empire Strikes Back. Historical Legacies and Democratic Political Culture in Ukraine
abstract: This study investigates how Ukraine’s geographical patterns of democratic political culture are shaped by historical legacies from long defunct empires and states. The thesis’ focus is on what has been called a “natural experiment”, whereby the lands of present-day Ukraine were divided, first between the Habsburg Empire and the Russian Empire (1772-1917), and later between Poland and the Soviet Union (1921-1939). The aim is to find out if the empires and states which ruled over Ukraine in these 
journal: Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA) (University of Bergen)