Paul D'Anieri examines the prospects for reform in Ukraine's fourth republic. He lays out the reasons for reform failure in the past, using the lenses of rational choice, institutional design, historical institutionalism, state-society relations, modernization theory, identity issues and democracy promotion. After examining some past successes, he addresses issues of who will be the crucial agents of reform (state, civil society, external agents) and sequencing. Ultimately, Ukraine has been more successful at overturning previous systems than building the kind of government and economy that many people think are necessary.

Oxana Shevel takes up the theme of historical memory as a central component of Ukrainian identity. Conceptions of history have become pivotal in understanding what it means to be Ukrainian, and in particular the nature of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia. Shevel seeks to explain why these issues have become so polarized and what paths might be open to handling the politics of memory in a way that is less divisive. She sees potential in the fact that a significant minority of survey respondents favors a pluralism in which individuals are free to maintain different interpretations of historical events. She examines Spain's successful efforts to overcome the divides in that country as a possible positive model for Ukraine.

Lucan Way examines regional aspects of Ukrainian identity by comparing it with similar phenomena in Bangladesh, Albania, and Kyrgyzstan. He points out that in each of these cases, regionalism makes it difficult to consolidate democratic government and carry out reforms. However, regionalism also undermines efforts by authoritarian leaders to consolidate their power because it helps opposition to mobilize. As regionalism becomes less pronounced in Ukraine following the Russian annexation of Crimea and the fighting in the Donbas, the key challenge is to promote reform without excluding groups central to Ukraine's democratic future. One promising reform would reverse the strongest curbs on Soviet era symbolism, and some form of decentralization might also help.

Serhiy Kudelia takes an institutional approach to understanding corruption in Ukraine, arguing that as Ukraine's institutional model has changed, patterns of corruption have changed along with it. Despite Ukraine's turbulent post-Soviet evolution, neither the fact of corruption nor the extent of it has changed dramatically. This continuity he attributes to permissive conditions, in terms of weak institutionalization, and to powerful incentives for actors to engage in venality. His analysis is troubling in that it shows that political competition, the goal of democratization, tends to spur corruption on the part of leaders. He offers some suggestions for reform, including through changing the campaign financing laws.

Daphne Athanasouli compares corruption in Ukraine to that in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Poland, Romania, and Russia using the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators and then examines the firm level, using the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey. She shows that Ukraine's problems are quite similar to those elsewhere in the region, and confirms that corruption in Ukraine rivals that in Russia and Kazakhstan. Nevertheless, she points to policies like improving the use of egovernance techniques and the role of a free media as potentially helping to ensure that anti-corruption efforts are fully implemented in the future.

Ukraine has changed its constitution repeatedly since independence in 1991. Oleksandr Fisun focuses on the repeated renegotiation of constitutional arrangements as the political power of patronal presidents rises and falls. In this view, constitutions are effects more than causes. He then considers the various contextual shortcomings that undercut any constitutional arrangement in Ukraine. These include penetration of the government by powerful rent-seekers, the absence of a balanced tax base, and the weakness of the Weberian state. He points out that now the focus should not be on redistributing power between the president, prime minister, and parliament, but rather on subverting the ability of politicians and rent-seeking entrepreneurs to "play with the rules" and conduct frequent constitutional experiments.

Henry Hale looks at patronal presidentialism across the post-communist space, and concludes that where patronalism prevails, divided-executive constitutions are more conducive to democracy than those with strong presidencies. In this sense, Ukraine moved forward in 2004, backwards when those constitutional changes were subsequently overturned, and forward again when the 2004 constitution was restored in 2014. However, as Hale points out, constitutional provisions are not all-determining. Whether divided executives are effective at promoting other kinds of reform, such as market reforms, is unclear. Nevertheless, a divided executive is the best alternative in a bad situation.

Many other aspects of reform, including economic reform and democratization, depend in large part on a functioning judicial system. Maria Popova's findings reported in this chapter on politicized prosecution in Ukraine are sobering. Looking at a series of cases from 2001 to 2010, she determines that under the Yanukovych administration, political prosecution became a more effective means to sideline one's rivals. While this might be explained in terms of Yanukovych's greater enmity to democracy, Popova hypothesizes that a process of authoritarian learning is at work, in that Yanukovych and others have learned over time how to use the prosecution process more effectively. This outcome highlights that not all actors are interested in reform; and that policy innovation can be for the worse as well as the better.

Daniel Beers looks at the experience of judicial reform across the post-communist cases, and gleans several lessons. Among the most important is that "institutional solutions have important limitations as drivers of the reform process." Not only do informal practices sometimes negate the effects of institutional reforms, but when they do, the entire concept of judicial reform is undermined by cynicism. Moreover, highly autonomous courts can be as hazardous as dependent ones, because they can become targets of politicians jealous of their authority. Beers finds two important sources of meaningful reform. First, the European Union has played a widely acknowledged role in judicial reform in the post-communist region. More surprisingly, Beers finds a strong positive role for low-level actors—individuals and firms who turn to the courts to resolve disputes and court employees committed to improvement.

In contrast to many other scholars, Taras Kuzio shows how the corruption, shadow economy, and organized crime that plague Ukraine today emerged in the late Soviet period and then took advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Through a detailed analysis of oligarchs' roles in a wide range of enterprises, he shows empirically how corruption works at the micro-level. He also shows why the foundations of the Donetsk group in organized crime networks prepared it to outcompete the Dnipropetrovsk oligarchs for power in post-Soviet Ukraine. Kuzio's chapter leaves it clear that the current patterns of "non-reform" that we see in Ukraine are deeply entrenched and resistant to change. While the 2014 revolution opened space for reform, many actors are striving to take advantage of the current turmoil to gain control over economic assets.

Georgi Derluguian helps explain why Ukraine wound up with this oligarch problem in the first place, identifying the cause as a Ukraine's peripheral position in the world economy and the failure of its elites to cooperate for a larger good during the critical moment of the USSR's collapse. Here a comparison with China proves useful. Derluguian argues that China succeeded because its relatively simple state allowed its leaders to work together to orient the country toward the needs of the global economy, while the complexity of Soviet institutions (including its division into multiple federal units) made such cooperation much more challenging. After the USSR collapsed, various "violent entrepreneurs" were able to take advantage of the resulting chaos to their own advantage, becoming oligarchs or state-based predators that have vested individual interests in subverting reforms.

In addressing the central issue of economic reform, Alexander Pivovarsky points out that Ukraine succeeded in making the basic market reforms by reducing the state's role in the economy, but he sees these as necessary but not sufficient conditions for a well-functioning economy. Ukraine, he finds, lacks necessary "market enhancing" institutions that are needed to make markets effective, including rule of law, competition policies, and market institutions specific to particular economic sectors.

Alexander Libman and Anastassia Obydenkova set out inductively to identify the countries whose economies are most similar to Ukraine's using a hierarchical cluster analysis of indicators of the micro-level institutions, such as obtaining permits, registering property, and enforcing contracts. This analysis indicates that in terms of formal institutions, Ukraine performs like a country of southeastern Europe, while in informal terms, it looks more like the other post-Soviet states. While the formal institutional environment in Ukraine has improved, perceptions of the business climate have worsened. This highlights the disconnect between formal institutions and informal practices. They stress that government cannot directly change informal practices—it can only change formal rules or personnel.

The concluding chapter by Henry Hale and Robert Orttung identifies several common threads running through the chapters in the volume. Among these are the importance of taking into account that formal institutions will not work the same way they do in Western countries thanks to local informal practices, the difference between deeply embedded obstacles to reform and those that are more contingent, the need to focus on long-term solutions, how realistic various reform proposals are in light of the incentives of political actors who have the power to enact them, and the notion that many of the reforms discussed in the volume can reinforce each other. Ultimately, perhaps the single most important driver for change in Ukraine is the European Union.