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Abstract: The foreign policy agendas of Ukrainian political parties participating in parliamentary elections are among the important factors of influence on Ukrainians voting in favor or against. There is a positive correlation between the preferences of Ukrainian voters and the foreign policy orientations of the political parties as expressed in their electoral platforms. Even if it is not likely that in general foreign policy plays a dominant role in the average citizen''s voting decisions, it is, nevertheless, very relevant in the context of Ukrainian politics. In this article it is demonstrated that the use of foreign policy issues is a part of the overall electoral strategy of Ukrainian political parties. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the literature on electoral politics, full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. The reason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure middle-of-the-road policy to a lottery of two extremes with the same expectation. In this paper, we study the normative implications of convergence in a simple model of electoral competition, in which parties are uncertain about voters'' preferences. We show that, if political parties have incomplete information about voters'' preferences, the voters may prefer some degree of policy divergence. The intuition is that policy divergence enables voters to correct policies that are based on a wrong perception of their preferences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]