Personalism and the problem of institutionalization of political regimes (on the example of Ukraine)

The paper discusses the correlation of personalistic and institutional factors in the processes of radical transformation of political regimes. In classical political science, these factors were opposed to each other in the aspect of the inverse relationship: it was assumed that the personalization of political regimes, as a rule, occurs with insufficiently rooted democratic institutions and results in further erosion of the entire institutional system, which, in turn, strengthens the personalistic factor in the power and management processes. The author’s analysis of the Ukrainian case partially confirms this conclusion of classical political science. However, as the author shows, the processes of personalization of political regimes today are characteristic not only for transforming societies, but also for countries of “stable democracies”. This is facilitated by a change in the very essence of an increasingly mediatization of modern politics.