Levan Kakhishvili1; 1 Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS), Germany
Discussion
How does programmatic party competition emerge? Research on advanced democracies suggest the importance of following factors: the level of economic development (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes et al 2013); quality and longevity of democratic institutions (Keefer 2007; Keefer and Vlaicu 2007); quality and capacity of state bureaucracy (Shefter 1994); organizational capacity of political parties (Han 2021; Keefer and Khemani 2005); organized capitalist interest groups (Kuo 2018); and voters’ perceptions of parties and state bureaucratic apparatus (Bustikova and Corduneanu-Huci 2017). These factors, however, cannot explain the emergence of programmatic competition in post-Soviet hybrid regimes. Taking the case of Georgia, I argue that the change of government in 2012 election was a turning point when programmatic competition started to emerge. I compare the 2012 election to the regime change in 2003. Using content analysis of 46 party manifestos between 1992 and 2016 as well as 16 in-depth interviews with representative of Georgian political parties, I build an argument that actor characteristics such as access to financial resources and confidence in victory determine the choice of programmatic strategy of competition. At the same time, this is conditioned by the type of a political system – parliamentary or presidential.
