ELECTORAL MEMORY OF UKRAINIANS AS A SOCIO-POLITICAL PHENOMENON: AXIOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
Authors: Pohribna Viktoriia Leonidivna , Sakhan Olena Mykolaivna 
Published: October 2021

Problem setting. Given that voters usually react more to the past than to the vague future that their candidates for power “paint” in their minds during the election campaign, the problem of analyzing the phenomenon of electoral memory of Ukrainians in today’s challenges is relevant. The manipulation of collective memory by political elites in the electoral space is reflected in a process called “memory politics”.

Recent research and publications analysis. Based on the analysis of the concepts of collective memory of M. Halbwachs, A. Assmann, J. Olvik, M. Bloch, D. Zhukov, the commemoration of P. Nora, A. Megill, E. Romanovskaya, G. Gornova and the policy of memory. According to V. Achkasov, A. Miller, D. Gigauri, electoral memory is defined as the intentional orientation of the voters’ consciousness to the past, when the result is memory as a representation of a specific electoral behavior.

Paper objective. The aim of the article is to study the influence of electoral memory on the political choice of citizens and socio-political consequences of its recoding.

Paper main body. Electoral memory has been shown to involve external coding using certain political and psychological technologies, including and manipulative. The example of the analysis of the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2019 shows how the meaningful recoding of the electoral memory of Ukrainians took place. The structure of electoral memory includes codes that: 1) do not position politics as a professional activity that requires special professional training; 2) give a positive color to dilettantism in politics under the slogan of ensuring the constitutional right of everyone not only to vote but also to be elected; 3) given that memory operates not with facts but with images, has the ability to sort, organize and select these images and regulates their storage (short-term-long), deform the mechanism of transformation of short-term memory into long-term (so-called, “Consolidation of the trail”), produce a cult of “new faces” in politics. Such changes in the characteristics of the electoral memory of voters in Ukraine will inevitably lead to changes in the mechanism of functioning of its electoral space.

According to the electoral process, the concept of space is three-dimensional and characterizes the positioning of its actors in conditions of electoral competition, determines (1) the rating of the candidate (applicants) for power in the political landscape of society, (2) “distance” separating him (them) with competitors in the struggle for the vote, (3) the ability to change this distance. Changes in the structure of electoral memory most actively affect the processes that determine the third dimension of electoral space ‑ the “drift” of the electorate from election to election according to patterns of social tectonics. Given the predominance of short-term electoral memory, the electoral space becomes very mobile and unpredictable, dependent on a large number of situational external factors, and the unstable socio-political situation slows down the process of rationalizing political choices and forming long-term electoral memory.

Conclusions of the research. As a result of the analysis the author's typology of electoral memory is offered, which includes the characteristics of permanent, situational and ambivalent (transitional) types, selected on the basis of the following indicators: main resource, implementation mechanism, information storage time, formation factors, degree of volitional regulation, mental activity regulators. The conclusions emphasize that the structural elements of electoral memory are embedded in the political process and are constantly reproduced in appropriate actions that should be aimed at creating and maintaining a collective identity.