The Language of the Presidential Election Campaign in Ukraine

The objective of the article is to trace and analyze Ukrainian language use in the recent presidential election campaign, paying particular attention to lexical innovations, neologisms, and satirical allusions. These changes are presented as the continuation of a steady process of democratization or liberalization of the Ukrainian language, a phenomenon some researchers previously attributed only to Russian. The language practices of the "Kuchma-Yanukovych regime" is presented and analyzed. The view of Yushchenko by his supporters as the narodnyi kandydat/prezydent (the people’s candidate/President) finds its antipode in political neologisms coined by Yanukovych’s camp (e.g., nashysty/nashysts’kyi), which were designed to attribute fascist tendencies to Yushchenko’s bloc, Nasha Ukraina ’Our Ukraine’. The egg farce during the campaign showed the vulnerability of Yanukovych’s camp to satire.     

The Accuracy of the National Preelection Polls in the 2004 Presidential Election

The 2004 presidential election campaign provided a venue fora wide variety of polling, and it was not without its controversies.In the end, the final estimates of the preelection polls, thebread and butter of the polling industry, were very good atsuggesting it would be a close race, with Bush the likely winner.In historical perspective, the overall performance was aboveaverage for the period since 1956. Issues raised in the medialeading up to the end of the campaign and the final estimates,however, created some controversy, especially about the likelyvoter methodology used by different organizations. There werealso some anomalies at the end of the campaign as some firmsand collaborators ended up producing different estimates ofthe outcome depending on likely voter definitions or the modeof data collection.     

The Impact of Cell Phone Noncoverage Bias on Polling in the 2004 Presidential Election

Despite concerns that the accuracy of preelection telephonepolls would be harmed by the omission of voters who could bereached only by cell phone, most national polls performed wellin predicting President George W. Bush’s reelection in2004, and state polls were generally accurate as well. The nationalexit poll conducted by the National Election Pool found that7 percent of Election Day voters had cell phone service butno land line; younger voters were far more likely to be cell-only:19 percent among those age 18–24 and 20 percent amongthose age 25–29. Within these two youngest age cohorts,cell-only voters were significantly more likely to be singleand childless. While cell-only voters were more supportive ofJohn Kerry than voters overall, they were similar to other voterswithin their own age cohort. Because of this, preelection telephonesurveys that weighted their data appropriately by age were notsignificantly biased by the absence of the cell-only voters.     

Extreme Rhetoric in the 2004 Presidential Campaign: Images Of Geopolitical and Regional Division

This article examines the most extreme discursive elements of political advertising in the 2004 presidential campaign in Ukraine. It deals with images of hostility, expression of ethnic phobias, and stereotypical schemes that were designed as remakes of Cold War motifs. The stereotypes in the discourse of the campaign served as populist references to different geopolitical orientations of the candidates, and as a vehicle for creating the conflicting identities of "two Ukraines." The discourse of extremes is analyzed within the context of an ideological transformation in the country that was determined by clashes between democratic and neo-totalitarian ways of thinking. The special focus of this article is to portray electoral rhetoric as one of those domains in public communication in which the image of identity takes shape.