Ministerial changes have become a routine event in Ukrainian politics. In August 2006, the Viktor Yanukovich cabinet counted 23 ministers (including himself as premier) . Eight months later, eight of these ministers are no longer on the job. In other words, more than a third of the original ministers survived less than eight months at their post.
Governments in Ukraine change regularly – since 1991, the country has had 13 cabinets. As a rule, changes in government typically mean several ministers are replaced. It is clear that a Ukrainian minister who starts his career (female ministers are extremely rare) should not hope to stay on the job for very long.
Political decision makers all over the world change jobs quickly, but Ukrainian politicians seems to be particularily proficient. A study for Russia, for instance, found that the average length of a Russian minister’s career is less than two years, compared to three years for US cabinet members and 4.6 years for Western European ministers. In Soviet times, ministers held their post on average for more than eight years.
While cabinet shuffles obviously provide stories for journalists and materials for researchers, it’s less clear how affects the ‘real’ world.
Changing ministers and cabinets can be good for a country. Indeed, replacing a poorly performing minister is a good thing – in the UK, the resignation of a minister typically increases the popularity of a government. Similarly, a bad government that is overturned makes room for a new, potentially better one. New ministers or governments can also introduce new ideas. Some researchers have argued that governments that stay in power for too long are more likely to become beholden to special interest groups and are more likely to become corrupt.
On the other hand, frequent ministerial turnover can be harmful. Every time a minister’s career comes to an end, a new minister has to learn the job. Consequently, valuable experience is lost. The short duration of a typical ministerial career also means a minister has few incentives to think about long-term policies, and can lead to a focus on policies that bring short-run benefits. If a politician knows that he will not be re-elected then he may be tempted to spend recklessly while in office and leave his successor with a debt to repay. In addition, changing ministers often goes together with changing policies – precisely the kind of instability that is not liked by investors, both local and foreign.
Taking both effects into account, the ideal situation seems to lie somewhere in the middle – a country is best served by governments and ministers who think they have a fair chance to be re-elected if they perform well. They should neither be sure they will be re-elected, nor convinced that they won’t be re-elected.
The economic costs of too little or too much political stability are difficult to estimate. Ukraine has lived with instability ever since Independence and has experienced periods of decline as well as growth, seemingly indicating that political instability and growth are unrelated. International experience, however, shows that political instability and low economic growth typically do go hand-in-hand. Other factors that influence economic growth often dominate the relationship between the two variables. It is not really clear whether there is a relationship between low growth and instability: Does political instability cause low economic growth or does low economic growth cause political instability? Most likely, it’s a combination of both.
Looking at the situation in Ukraine, it doesn’t seem that the primary reason to fire ministers is their bad performance. And, so far, new governments haven’t been able to convincingly show that they are better than the previous ones. In Ukraine, it also doesn’t seem to take long for a government to become beholden to special interest groups. At the same time, short-term populist policies seem to be very popular and declared policies change frequently (admittedly much faster than policies that are actually implemented). Taking this and the above mentioned statistics into account, it would seem that Ukraine would benefit from some more political stability.
Tom Coupe is Director of the Kyiv School of Economics and Academic Director of the Kyiv Economics Institute.
