Abstract
This research examines the post-1991 history of Ukraine through tensions between its people and the elites, which carves out space for an examination of the political agency of the people, subsequently re-imagined as populus, demos, and plebs. Acemoglu andRobinson's framework (2019) that defines a political regime through relations between a state and a society stands as a conceptual backbone of the present study.
It is complemented with a political rendering of Albert O. Hirschman's approach (1970) to explicate the main strategies of political action Ukrainians lean upon.
Several ideal-typical settings are distinguished and described: 1) 'Potemkin democracy', referring to patronal politics with disempowered people falling back on the 'exit'strategy, interpreted as migration, curtailed reproduction, and disengagement from the political sphere; 2) 'radical democracy', in which people resort to mass protests in order to acquire a 'voice'in strategic decision-making; 3) 'ocular democracy', in which people form the audience in a political theatre, defined through their 'loyalty'to a leader as their political 'trustee', with social media presence and sociological polls acting as feedback loops.