Becoming Citizens: New State-Society Relations Emerging in Wartime Ukraine

• In Event: Ukraine’s Political Economy & Wartime Politics

Abstract

This paper draws on a series of cross-sectional surveys carried out in Ukraine by the Razumkov Centre and the primary author in 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 to probe the impact of the Russian invasion of February 2022 on institutional trust - citizen trust in the state - and attitudes toward taxation. The question we aim to analyze in this paper is whether the war has opened up an opportunity for such a transformation in institutional trust and tax compliance. Thus far, using a difference-in-differences approach for identification, we have found, based on the 2020, 2022 and 2023 surveys, that the experience of war spurred institutional trust, but that attitudes and behavioral dispositions related to the tax regime shifted less noticeably.

Author

• Marc P. Berenson, King's College London (UK)