Do party programmes matter for voters in post-Soviet hybrid regimes? Case study of Georgia

During pre-election competition political parties employ programmatic and non-programmatic strategies to mobilize their voters. Generally, non-programmatic strategies can be a powerful vote maximizer especially in hybrid regimes, such as post-Soviet Georgia. Such strategies would include personalization of politics and reliance on leaders’ charisma; clientelistic approaches, e.g. vote buying or coercive strategies; etc. Somewhat paradoxically, Georgian political parties still engage in programmatic competition and produce clearly differentiable policy offers through their manifestos, even though they do not expect their voters to read these documents. From the supply side, this is an indication that for the very least parties in Georgia are open to forming a programmatic linkage with their voters. However, it is important to understand the demand side as well, i.e. how voters respond to programmatic strategies of party competition. Consequently, focusing on perceptions of voters, this paper will explore to what extent party programmes matter for voters in Georgia. The paper will use mixed methodology to achieve the set goal. First, the paper will ask whether a patter emerges between party-voter ideological proximity and voting behavior. To answer this question, the paper will rely on findings based on quantitative data collected through a voting advice application (VAA) – Election Compass Georgia. The VAA was created by International Republican Institute and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in cooperation with Kieskompas. Second, the paper will qualitatively investigate how voters perceive parties and political participation in general to understand whether it is programmatic factors determining these perceptions. For this purpose, data from two series of focus group discussions (FGD) will be used. The first strand of FGDs was carried out in 2017 and involved 48 young party activists – members of youth organizations – as participants. In total, nine FGDs were conducted with each group being homogeneous in terms of to which party participants belonged. The discussions explored what factors motivate young people to join a given political party. Nine parties were selected based on a criterion of 1% threshold in the 2016 parliamentary election. Additionally, twelve more FGDs will be analyzed exploring markers that undecided voters in Georgia use to differentiate political parties from each other and reasons for why people should or should not join political parties. These FGDs were conducted in six different cities of Georgia including the capital. Groups in these FGDs were homogeneous in terms of age and overall included 93 participants. Undecided voters are particularly interesting as they are the least likely to exhibit factors related to programmatic party-voter linkages determining how they perceive parties and political participation. The expectation is that different types of party-voter linkages co-exist with each other. However, it is likely that factors related to ideas, values, specific policy visions, etc. are significant in determining FGD participants’ perceptions and motivations. This would mean that the party programmes matter for voters in Georgia, which is an important finding as party politics in post-Soviet hybrid regimes is often assumed to be exclusively personalistic and/or clientelistic.