CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Turmanidze, Koba |
|---|---|
| Title | Taking Partly Free Voters Seriously: How Party-Voter Linkages Affect Political Stability |
| Summary | 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), 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. |
| Supervisor | Matteo Fumagalli |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/turmanidze_koba.pdf |
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