Is Party Competition Programmatic in Post-Soviet Hybrid Regimes? Case Study of Georgia

Political competition in post-Soviet regimes (excluding the three Baltic States) is often considered to be deficient of programmatic nature. Instead, it is argued that competition revolves around either charismatic personalities or clientelistic networks. Such an assumption, however, is misleading or at least does not provide a full picture in all its complexity and nuances of what is going on in post-Soviet hybrid regimes. This paper argues that persistence of this assumption has more to do with the fact that post-Soviet political parties do not cohesively fit established western European ideologies, than with the nature of the reality. Consequently, the primary question, to which this paper seeks an answer, is whether or not party competition in post-Soviet hybrid regimes is programmatic. Although, according to Freedom House’s Nations in Transit reports, there are three post-Soviet hybrid regimes, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, this paper uses a single case study design to allow for an in-depth analysis of the Georgian case with a potential to cover the other two cases in the further research. This paper uses what can be called a minimal functional definition of programmatic party competition. Programmatic party competition, which is often believed to be the cornerstone of democracy, cannot exist without voters having more than one policy options to choose from. Therefore, the paper uses Bartolini’s electoral decidability to conceptualize a programmatic nature of competition. Electoral decidability refers to “issue-position differentiation among parties and visibility and clarity of these differences for the voter”. The usefulness of this definition is its elegance to depart from traditional western European ideologies. In fact, ideologies do not matter at all for political competition to have programmatic nature as long as parties offer different policy options from each other. Therefore, the argument, that post-Soviet political parties may not have consistent political ideologies and may offer mutually exclusive promises from elections to elections, loses sense. To evaluate how different policy offers are in Georgia, the paper analyzes all available party manifestos since the first elections in 1992 after regaining independence (seven elections and 45 manifestos in total). Each manifesto has been coded using CMP rules as CMP database itself is missing a range of codes added to the coding framework at later stages. However, on rare occasions when inductive approach of coding would suggest introducing a new category, a new code was added. The resulted data has been analyzed using a logarithmic method of party position calculation, i.e. using log odds-ratios for point estimates of policy positions for each party on each issue. Issues have been aggregated in policy areas creating five different dimensions of competition: foreign policy orientation; power distribution; organization of the economic system; welfare state; nationalism. The findings suggest that there is more diversity of policy offers than it can be expected in the context of a hybrid regime that has experienced Soviet rule. Therefore, these findings challenge the established ideas about how political party competition operates in countries like Georgia.