Best of Both Worlds? Programmatic and Clientelistic Party Competition in Hybrid Regimes: Case Study of Georgia

How do political parties compete in hybrid regimes? Existing literature on party competition suggests two major forms of competitive party behaviour. Parties either propose ideologically driven programmes that offer voters public goods or engage in clientelistic practices to win votes by offering voters private goods. Usually, the literature assumes that these two forms of competition are mutually exclusive and vary according to the regime type. In democracies, parties engage in programmatic competition, while in non-democratic settings, parties pursue clientelism. However, this paper departs from this assumption and aims to construct a conceptual framework of competitive party behaviour that is applicable for democratic and non-democratic contexts. This conceptual framework is useful to explore how the two forms of party competition are intertwined in hybrid regimes, which helps understand party behaviour as well as stability and instability of policy positions over time. Furthermore, by relying on rich and unique data about post-Soviet Georgia, the paper investigates mechanisms that explain why combining the two forms of competitive behaviour is the most optimal path to electoral victory. The proposed conceptual framework has three elements answering three questions: (1) What do parties offer voters in exchange of their political support? (2) What is the referent group in the society with which parties try to form a linkage? (3) What facilitates the formation of party-voter linkages? The answers to these questions will vary depending on whether a party adopts a programmatic or clientelistic strategy of competition. The three questions respectively correspond to varied values of (1) goods: public or private, (2) referent group in the society: social class or patronage networks, and (3) facilitator of party-voter linkages: identity or brokers. These questions can capture whether in a given case a party in a democratic context is engaged in clientelism or whether a party in a non-democratic context chooses programmatic strategy of competition. The paper represents an in-depth case study of Georgia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. To build the arguments, the paper is relying on three strands of empirical data. First, all 46 available parliamentary party manifestos of between 1992 and 2016 have been hand-coded to analyse policy positioning of Georgian parties and evaluate two types of changes over time: quantitative, i.e., policy positions adopted by parties; and qualitative, i.e. content of the manifestos. Second, 16 in-depth interviews have been conducted with various party representatives who have participated in writing manifestos. This data is useful to explore what functions parties assign to manifestos and how the production of them has changed over time. Third, a fieldwork has been conducted to explore how elections are conducted on the lowest precinct-level and how parties interact with voters through electoral brokers and their personal networks. This fieldwork covered included 20 informal unrecorded interviews with electoral brokers, i.e., individuals who facilitate clientelistic transactions.