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Taking Partly Free Voters Seriously Taking Partly Free Voters Seriously: How Party-Voter Linkages Affect Political Stability Koba Turmanidze A dissertation submitted to the Central European University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In Political Science CEU eTD Collection Supervisor: Matteo Fumagalli Word Count: 62,149 January 15, 2019 © Copyright Koba Turmanidze All Rights Reserved. Year: 2019 Title: Taking Partly Free Voters Seriously: How Party-Voter Linkages Affect Political Stability, Dissertation, Central European University, Budapest Author: Koba Turmanidze I, the undersigned Koba Turmanidze, candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Central European University, Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations, declare herewith that the present thesis is my own work, based on my research. The thesis contains no materials previously written and published by another person, except where appropriate acknowledgement is made in the form of bibliographical reference and notes. For those parts of the work which are based on joint research, disclosure of the respective contribution of the authors is made. I also declare that no part of the thesis has been submitted in this form to any other institution of higher education for an academic degree. ------------------------------- CEU eTD Collection January 15, 2019 Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without generous support of many individuals and organizations. I am thankful to my supervisor Matteo Fumagalli for his mentoring and encouragement through these years. I also give special thanks to Levente Littvay for his invaluable methodological guidance on different components of my dissertation research. I owe special gratitude to Higher Education Support Programme (HESP) of the Open Society Foundation, for giving me the once in a lifetime opportunity to combine PhD studies with my work at CRRC and Tbilisi State University. I thank Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN) for their generous support for the project which greatly contributed to this dissertation. I am indebted to my CRRC-Georgia colleagues for their care, patience and diligence at work while I took time off to concentrate on the dissertation. I thank my colleagues and partners from NDI for giving me the opportunity to participate in collecting valuable survey data for Georgia’s political history. Most importantly, NDI’s leadership deserves credit for making the survey data publicly available. I am grateful to the editor of Caucasus Survey, Laurence Broers, and the four anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions for improving the two articles published in the Caucasus Survey. I have had a privilege to solicit and receive feedback from many academics and practitioners, including Armenak Antinian, Giorgi Babunashvili, Timothy Blauvelt, Alexis Diamond, Aaron Erlich, Mariella Falkenhain, Julie George, Dustin Gilbreath, Hans Gutbrod, Tsisana Khundadze, Heghine Manasyan, Natia Mestvirishvili, David Sichivana, Rati Shubladze, Kristine Vacharadze, Mikayel Zolyan, and Tinatin Zurabishvili. I am very grateful to each of them. Two people contributed the most to this dissertation and I am deeply indebted to them. Dustin Gilbreath, CRRC colleague and co-author, was a tireless discussion partner and helped a lot to refine the work with his thoughtful comments. Mariam Gabedava, my wife, first reader and editor, has helped with discussion, ideas, research, and pushed me past the finish line with CEU eTD Collection a combination of encouragement and pressure. I hope to repay this debt when she picks up the PhD baton. i Abstract This dissertation looks at how party-voter linkages shape short and long-term political outcomes in the competitive authoritarian regimes of the South Caucasus. The three articles in the dissertation highlight two counterintuitive findings for hybrid regimes: While the electoral playing field is uneven and people’s trust in political institutions remains low, parties still take their electorates seriously and establish linkages with them on the interpersonal, programmatic, and policy levels. Most importantly, party-voter linkages are consequential for political outcomes: (1) Party-voter contacts before elections increase partisanship; (2) whether the party puts forward concrete or ambiguous electoral promises, change turnout and party support; and 3) launching radical reforms to increase state capacity decreases ruling party support. Facing people’s low trust in political institutions, political actors in hybrid regimes have fewer supporters than necessary to win competitive elections. Hence, parties have incentives to invest in face-to-face interactions with voters before elections to garner more votes. The first article, “Talk to Her: How Party-voter Linkages Increase Partisanship in Georgia”, shows that such contacts between parties and voters significantly increase overall partisanship for both the incumbent and the opposition. Since partisanship is highly correlated with turnout and party support, strengthening party-voter linkages may have a positive impact on political stability in a hybrid regime. Naturally, electoral promises are an integral part of party-voter interactions and this is where the second article, “Promises, Lies and the Accountability Trap: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Armenia and Georgia”, complements the findings from the article on face-to- face contacts. The article analyzes the impact of electoral programs on voters’ decisions to support a party, especially in a situation where an abstract promise is made without specifying the future actions of the party. Since being ambiguous is a winning strategy, the article argues, it may create a spiral of unmet expectations and disillusioned voters over time. This scenario, dubbed the “accountability trap” in the article, negatively influences political stability. Drawing on the selectorate theory of Bueno De Mesquita and his collaborators (2005), CEU eTD Collection the third article, “The Self-defeating Game: How State Capacity and Policy Choice Affect Political Survival”, complements the above described findings by looking at the influence of policy-level linkages on the incumbent’s electoral success. It shows that an incumbent upsetting the institutional status quo in order to increase state capacity is likely to lose elections and hence, has a negative effect on political stability. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... i Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Overview ................................................................................................................................ 1 The argument.......................................................................................................................... 4 How do institutions matter? ................................................................................................... 7 The forgotten electorate ....................................................................................................... 11 How to link causes and outcomes? ...................................................................................... 14 Competitive regimes in the South Caucasus ........................................................................ 19 How do the linkages work? .................................................................................................. 23 Personal linkages .............................................................................................................. 24 Programmatic linkages ..................................................................................................... 25 Policy linkages .................................................................................................................. 26 Contribution ........................................................................................................................... 2 Talk to Her: How Party-Voter Linkages Increase Partisanship in Georgia ............................... 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 3 The perils of nonpartisanship ................................................................................................. 5 Data and methods ................................................................................................................. 10 Analysis and results .............................................................................................................. 16 Covariates of partisanship ................................................................................................ 16 Talk works ........................................................................................................................ 19 For whom the talk works? ................................................................................................ 24 Party-voter linkages under “fragile democratic
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