“Doctor of the Mono-Majority”: How Dissertation Candidate Arakhamia Studied What Doesn’t Exist

The head of the Servant of the People faction, Davyd Arakhamia, decided to enrich domestic scholarship and will defend a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Academic degrees for those in power seem to be anointment with honey. Why do they pursue them — for prestige, to satisfy ambition, or for supplements to their meager salaries? The head of the presidential administration under Kuchma, Dmytro Tabachnyk, defended a doctoral dissertation based on a so-called collection of works — that is permissible, but the collection must consist of academic works, not interviews or anthologies of various authors that Tabachnyk recorded as monographs. Then there was Volodymyr Lytvyn, who rose to speaker of the Verkhovna Rada and vice president of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and was repeatedly caught in brazen plagiarism. The list could go on and on. The apex: a doctor of economic sciences better known as “professor” Yanukovych.

Of course, the news of the scientific ambitions of the head of the largest parliamentary faction prompted scholars to scrutinize his dissertation for plagiarism. But no direct borrowings were found — after all, presumably the scientific work was written by a not-dumb person who learned from the examples cited.

True, it was not entirely free of borrowings — a scandal involved the reviewer of the esteemed dissertation candidate. Scholars claim that her doctoral dissertation contains parallels with five Russian sources.

But let us leave the reviewers aside, as well as the perennial rhetorical question: where do government officials and deputies find the time to write dissertations, and in the midst of an exhausting war at that (Arakhamia began publishing on his dissertation topic in 2024 year)? Let us also set aside the subtle nuance that Davyd Heorhiiovych chairs the supervisory board of the Kyiv University of Intellectual Property and Law — the same university whose president is Serhii Kivalov, the former head of the Central Election Commission, who after the presidential election in 2004 year earned the nickname “Count” for falsifying vote counts in favor of Viktor Yanukovych. On the university’s website their photos sit next to each other congenially.

However, the most interesting thing in Davyd Arakhamia’s dissertation turned out to be its topic and the way the author develops it. The deputy studies “Peculiarities of the activity of a parliamentary faction with the rights of a coalition in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine,” or, more simply, the so-called mono-majority. That’s interesting. Who could know more about the Ukrainian mono-majority than the person who has led it from the very beginning? And not only knows it, but recommends the mono-majority for Ukraine, citing the British experience (the so-called Westminster model):

“It is substantiated that the Westminster model as an example of European experience of the parliamentary majority formed on the basis of a single political party (mono-majority) can have the greatest potential for adaptability to Ukrainian realities” (p. 175) (emphasis added by us).

What Arakhamia saw in his dissertation — and what he didn’t see

The problem is not the existence of a mono-majority itself. Such a practice exists in the experience of democratic countries. The problem is different: scientific work must study reality. That is, not only how a political construction should work according to laws and regulations, but how it works in real life. Especially when that real experience is right in front of the researcher’s eyes.

In Davyd Arakhamia’s dissertation legal and regulatory acts, rules, instructions, etc., are listed. But what actually happened around them is absent. And although the chapter conclusions state what needs improvement, and even vaguely mention that dominance of the executive over the legislature sometimes occurs, the dissertation text does not reveal this at all. It gives the impression that this dissertation is a total abstraction. It is detached from the practice carried out in Zelensky’s era, not least by the faction leader Arakhamia himself.

And the reality is this: the Ukrainian mono-majority was formed by populist Volodymyr Zelensky out of thin air, from random people and, as malicious tongues say, supposedly with money paid in envelopes (maybe that is the “greatest potential for adaptability to Ukrainian realities”?). And not at all on the principles that Davyd Heorhiiovych describes in quasi-sophisticated terms (such as “matrix of stability”). In practice the mono-majority turned into a conveyor that, in “turbo mode,” pushed through dubious decisions, ignoring even the simplest parliamentary procedures for their adoption.

Now that mono-majority has effectively collapsed — the parliament is full of statements from Servant members about leaving it. They are simply not allowed into the voting hall. The presidential administration is trying to keep the mono-majority together and make it controllable with persuasion, coaxing, as well as pressure from law enforcement and money (as NABU investigations show). But this does not help: the once-largest faction in parliament can no longer secure passage of presidential or cabinet bills solely with its own votes and is failing important laws.

The mono-majority is also losing public support, and this process began even before the full-scale invasion. A KMIS poll in January 2022 year showed: if elections had been held then, the Servants would have received only 14% among those who had decided on a choice. That is a threefold (!) reduction compared to 43% on party lists in the 2019 election. At the next elections the Servant of the People brand might not exist at all.

One would think this should have been one of the main subjects of study for a person who was inside the process the whole time. Especially since Arakhamia himself writes about the “potential for adaptability to Ukrainian realities,” implying an apparently positive experience. But these realities are almost off-screen in the dissertation. For now it very much resembles a cargo-dissertation: all external attributes of scholarly work are present, but the reality it should investigate and explain has vanished. And is this scientific research?

Westminster, which will not happen in Ukraine

Now about the Westminster model that Davyd Arakhamia recommends for Ukraine and which we discuss with first-year students. It is the classic British model (Westminster is where the parliament is located). Its logic is simple: the winner takes all. Two large parties alternate in power. The winning party forms single-party governments and, having a majority in parliament, can implement its policies. The opposition cannot significantly influence its decisions. This is so-called majoritarian democracy. In contrast, consensual democracy involves seeking compromises among various political forces.

However, this construction does not operate in a vacuum. In the United Kingdom it rests not only on parliamentary majority but also on established political traditions. There is no practice of destroying the opposition: everyone understands that in the next elections today’s opposition may win and become the government.

Moreover, Britain itself is moving away from the Westminster model because the political situation is changing. In the 21st century it already has two (not one, as Arakhamia writes) examples of coalition governments. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have received significant political autonomy, and their electoral systems are no longer purely majoritarian. The unitarism that is part of the Westminster model is eroding.

Another important component of the Westminster model is the majoritarian electoral system. It works to the winner’s advantage: a party can gain a much larger share of seats in parliament than the share of votes it received in the election. Meanwhile, “third” parties suffer discrimination: under such a system it is much harder to convert voters’ support into parliamentary mandates.

In Ukraine, however, majoritarianism worked in favor of those in power or local oligarchs. That is why one of the Euromaidan demands was a proportional electoral system with open lists, which is provided for by the current Electoral Code. Does Arakhamia remember this? Or perhaps he already knows something about plans of the mono-majority to change everything?

And in general, comparing the British parliamentary model to Ukraine’s mixed model is, to put it mildly, not entirely correct. It feels like the person who wrote about the Westminster model in the dissertation does not quite understand what it actually means.

While in Britain two major parties have alternated in power for decades, multiparty systems and coalition governments are normal for other European countries. Ukraine also follows this logic. It is hard to imagine two parties taking turns in power here: our country is too colorful for such a construct.

By the way, Arakhamia’s dissertation mentions that Ukraine has seen two other cases of a mono-majority. It is unclear where this information comes from and on what it is based. That did not even happen under Yanukovych — the Party of Regions needed an extra boost in the form of the Communist Party.

And the “group 239” — the communist majority formed after the 1990 election — existed back in the Ukrainian SSR. So in independent Ukraine a true mono-majority appeared only after the parliamentary elections in 2019 year.

So what — mono-majority again?

Thus we have a paradox: the current Ukrainian phenomenon of a mono-majority has turned out to be a failure and is unlikely to be realizable in future parliamentary configurations. Yet Arakhamia presents this model as the result of his “scientific research,” and even as already implemented in practice.

Instead of a pseudo-mono-majority during the war of annihilation against Ukraine, there should have been a coalition/government of national unity. But Davyd Heorhiiovych’s boss stubbornly refuses this. And Arakhamia himself does not recommend it in his dissertation either, preferring the mono-majority and the imposition of unilateral decisions from the very top of power.

Returning to the work of the future Doctor of Philosophy: the value of any scientific research lies in examining and explaining reality, not in forcing reality to fit a preconceived picture. Especially when real facts shatter that picture into pieces. Otherwise it is no longer science, but an imitation of it. A cargo-dissertation.