Can intra-party conflict trigger the emergence of programmatic inter-party competition in hybrid regimes? Case study of Georgia

Why do parties start engaging in programmatic competition? Conventional wisdom about inter-party competition implies that party systems transition from electoral clientelism to party programmes due to various factors: economic growth (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes et al 2013); improved quality of democratic institutions (Keefer 2007; Keefer and Vlaicu 2007); increased capacity of bureaucratic apparatus (Shefter 1994) and parties as organizations (Han 2021; Keefer and Khemani 2005); emergence of organized capitalist interest groups (Kuo 2018); and voters’ changing perceptions of parties and state bureaucracy (Bustikova and Corduneanu-Huci 2017). However, in hybrid regimes, programmatic inter-party competition cannot be deduced from the existence of party manifestos. Instead, it requires additional qualifiers to make these manifestos meaningful. This paper argues that one such qualifier includes the extent to which manifestos are a product of internal deliberative processes. Therefore, existence of intra-party conflict can be the key to emergence of programmatic inter-party competition. Studying the case of Georgia, I show that meaningful programmatic competition emerged in the context of highly salient 2012 parliamentary elections when the new challenger party produced an unusually lengthy and comprehensive manifesto, which led to nine-fold increase of an average length of manifestos in 2012 compared to previous elections. Considering that, the new challenger was an ad hoc coalition of five political parties from social democrats to conservatives, I argue that the intra-party conflict over the content of the manifesto triggered the process of emergence of a programmatic competition in the system. To support the arguments, the paper relies on in-depth interviews with representatives of Georgian political parties and qualitative content analysis of hand-coded manifestos produced by Georgian parties since gaining independence in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union.