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accounts. With the withdrawal of the state, the burden for financing state
services increasingly fell on the population itself. The rising cost of utilities hit
everyone alike. In Soviet times, each ethnic group saw the state as providing
goods to other groups at its expense. Under today’s quasi-market conditions, the
allocation mechanism is less group-based or ethnicized. Similarly, few residents
of either country count on the state to provide them a viable living standard.
Conclusion
Economic reform did not fuel ethnic conflict in post-Soviet Latvia and Ukraine. In
fact, I have argued in this paper that economic reform measures implemented in
these states paradoxically helped to facilitate ethnic cooperation rather than
conflict by breaking down Soviet-era group-based perceptions about social
mobility. The effects of economic reform, including the high cost of utilities and
frequent bank failures, were perceived as affecting everyone equally. In this
sense, they have come to represent what I have called an indivisible bad
a
negative policy outcome that purportedly affects everyone equally. The shift
from nationalist to economic mobilization, however, was not simply the result of
the entrance of new political entrepreneurs selling economic grievances. Rather,
nationalist politicians themselves began to make economic demands when
nationalist cues no longer resonated with ordinary individuals and when faced
with competition from politicians selling economic demands. While I had some
notion of the extent of nationalist demobilization in post-Soviet Latvia and
Ukraine before I collected and analyzed the data on street demonstrations from
Convention