ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the quality of democracy in Belarus and Ukraine comparatively, and aims to define what kind of polities are at present developing in these countries. Existing definitions of democracy seemingly fail to address adequately the proliferation and diversification of new regimes. In an attempt to anchor their expanding quantity and differing quality, scholars reduced their efforts to deploying various minimalist, parsimonious approaches to identify, forecast and compare the development of new regimes with established democracies. For much of political history democracy was not seen as an ideal to be achieved. Other forms of government were viewed as more capable of providing order to society. Belarus and Ukraine are two new regimes that seem to fit the criteria of a procedural definition of democracy, a ‘quasi-democracy’ that allows for certain institutional arrangements of democracy, but no provisions for appropriate ‘moral conduct’ on the part of the agency, which is the case in a demagogical democracy.
