The Impact of Political Risks on the Effectiveness of Public Policy

Public policy is one of the areas for regulating socio-economic, cultural, and environmental challenges that affect citizens' quality of life. The article aims to study the impact of political risks on the effectiveness of public policy in Ukraine. To achieve this goal, the authors examines the state of research on the problems of modern public policy and the political risks Ukraine faces. OpenAlex, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases were used to collect literature. 5,756 results were obtained by keywords. After removing 1,876 duplicates, screening, and thematic analysis, another 2,805 sources were rejected. 1,075 remained, which were evaluated according to the following criteria: topic, connection with the Ukrainian context, presence of challenges, language (English), date (from 2016), and methodology. As a result, 54 sources were included in the analysis. The VosViewer software was used to process the literature available in the OpenAlex database for the systematic literature analysis. The results emphasise that systemic corruption in public authorities is a significant risk. The high expropriation risk, which primarily concerns sanctioned assets, is also noted. High political violence risks were also reported, indicating instability that could escalate into internal conflicts or other political confrontations. Security risks are relatively moderate and inferior to public risks associated with economic processes. The conclusions summarise that the studied indicators demonstrate a high level of political and financial risks, which generally harm the conduct of public policy in Ukraine. An exceptionally high level of political violence and default threat may lead to governmental instability and problems implementing long-term political strategies.