Party of Regions has Much Older and Less Educated Constituency than Its Counterparts

Here are results of the 2006 Parliamentary Elections. I know that data is a bit outdated. However, it still says a lot about demographic differences among constituencies of three major political parties: Party of Regions (POR), Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko (BYUT), and Our Ukraine (OU). Actually, OU is now OUNS since Lutsenko's party National Self-defense joined it. Both figures indicate that POR enjoys much larger support of the "50+" group. So its constituency is older than both BYUT's and OUNS's. Moreover, POR also receives significantly larger public support among voters without a college/university degree. So its constituency is also less educated than of its counterparts, BYUT and OUNS. In the light of the upcoming presidential elections, it will be interesting to see whether these trends in the public opinion are still the same.

My prediction is that a poor economic performance under the Tymoshenko government has diverted a group of well-educated and working-age voters from BYUT. Moreover, a continuous gridlock in a relations between the Orange Revolutionaries, president Yushchenko and prime-minister Tymoshenko, also took away some public support from both BYUT and OUNS. Let's see whether POR will be able to capitalize on the current situation.





Data source: Kyiv International Institute of Sociology and the Razumkov Center, 2006.