Authors

Amy Eaglestone¹;  ¹ University of Birmingham, UK

Discussion

Political parties are seen as key actors in democratic consolidation as they promote democratic values and behaviours, but parties in multiparty systems, such as Moldova, are expected to do better than those in dominant party systems such as Georgia because they need to interact with other parties in a regular and systematic way to achieve their goals. This paper examines how political party interactions impact democracy reforms in pro-democracy regimes by comparing the multiparty system in Moldova (Alliance for European Integration coalition 2009-2015), to the dominant party system in Georgia (United National Movement 2004-2012).Using multi-method research, combining a most similar research design and process tracing methodology, a detailed comparative account of the two country cases is presented.These cases have functionally similar historical and contextual conditions, namely soviet legacy, developing democracy and geopolitical tensions, that shape political party behaviours. Taking these scope conditions into account, two different process theories illustrate the steps parties took to deal with changes to their democratic system.Findings show that parties in both systems failed to achieve essential democratic reforms, but in different ways. The multiparty system in Moldova allowed space for parties to negatively impact reforms from within the coalition government through instrumentalization and delay, as these parties were able to maintain clientelist networks and informal political processes. While the predominant party system in Georgia, provided the ruling party with the opportunity to exclude opposition and gradually acquire a high level of economic and political control that then worked to protect.