A Coalition Lost, Then Found: A Spatial Analysis of Ukraine's 2006 and 2007 Parliamentary Elections

Between 2006 and 2007, four political scientists asked how an ostensibly "tired" electorate might respond to two successive parliamentary elections among a nearly identical set of alternatives. Using the same spatial perspective and multidimensional metric scaling methods employed previously, they asked whether those same tools can be used to summarize the electorate's perceptions of its electoral choices in 2006 and 2007 and whether those perceptions respond to events in ways that "make sense." Is there evidence to suggest that parties and politicians in Ukraine must now respond to the strategic imperatives described by an abstract theory of spatial analysis developed to organize study of more established democracies?