Authoritarian Stability in the South Caucasus

Voting preferences, autocratic responses and regime stability in Armenia and Georgia

Matteo Fumagalli, Koba Turmanidze

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351044417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years, competitive authoritarianism has become an increasingly common form of non-democratic politics. What is the relationship between the demand for particular public policies and a regime's durability in office in such cases? How does policy-making interact with organizational power, the willingness to resort to coercion and patronage politics in countries home to democratic-looking institutions that none the less fall short of democratic standards?

In this book we show that such regimes do more than just survive and collapse. Moreover, we argue that far from being passive pawns in the hands of their leaders voters in competitive authoritarian regimes, do matter are taken seriously. We investigate how regimes and voters interact in the cases of Georgia and Armenia, two post-Soviet countries in the South Caucasus, to identify how voters preferences feed into policy-making and gauge the extent to which the regimes' adjustment of their policies crucially affects regime stability. To these ends, we draw on a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, including a survey experiment carried out in the two countries.

The volume was originally published as a special issue of the journal Caucasus Survey.

Taking partly free voters seriously: autocratic response to voter preferences in Armenia and Georgia

Matteo Fumagalli

and Koba Turmanidze

ABSTRACT

Do voters matter in competitive authoritarian regimes and, if so, how? Do their preferences make any difference in the way in which the regime conceives policies and goes about policy-making? In this article we show that they do, and that incumbents take them seriously. Crucially, the way the regime responds to policy demand determines their durability in office. In this article we explain why, despite strong similarities, the political regime ruling Armenia remained stable over the years (from the mid-1990s), whereas the one in Georgia has been unseated on two occasions (2003–2004 and 2012–2013). Evidence confirms that policy-making and the voters’ perceptions thereof also play an important role in determining whether a regime collapses or survives. The incumbents collect information on voter preferences, and devise policies in response to them. Policy-making thus matters and is extremely consequential. Paradoxically, however, policy-making makes a difference in counter-intuitive ways. The article concludes that a regime which refrains from making grand promises, or blatantly contradictory or unrealistic ones, has greater chances of surviving than those that set out to transform society, like Saakashvili’s Georgia. Ultimately, such policies backfire on those who launched them.

Introduction

We had conceptual disagreements. They [the leadership of the United National Movement that left the party] were doing surveys and saying that people want to hear about this, these are popular issues for the people and we should develop a program which does not irritate people by talking about something else. … I think very differently: you should not trudge behind the processes, should not follow the current, because only dead fish drift along with the current. You should be ready to swim against the current. The direction of the current may change, but your direction should never change. (Mikheil Saakashvili (President of Georgia, 2004–2013), New.on.ge 2017)

Despite considerable Western political and financial support, as well as an increase in both state capacity and – to a lesser extent – organizational power, Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgia went through several phases of instability. At times, this instability was tackled through extensive reliance on coercion, such as in 2007–2008 (Berglund 2014). The ruling party’s increasingly erratic – if grandiose in rhetoric and scale – policy-making paved the way to its own demise, brought about by the defeats in the 2012 parliamentary and 2013 presidential elections. By contrast, Armenia’s political elites – most notably former President Robert Kocharian (1998–2008) and President Serzh Sargsyan (2008–present) – managed to secure regime stability, despite far greater protests (Babayan 2015). Even the latest wave of opposition-driven protests in 2016 failed to unseat the incumbent (Novikova 2017).

That the regime in Armenia responded to voters’ preferences differently from that in Georgia and that its response affected its capacity to sustain its power, whereas Georgia experienced far greater instability, raises a number of questions which we explore in this special issue of Caucasus Survey. Do voters matter in competitive authoritarian regimes? If so, how exactly? Do their preferences make any difference in the way in which the regime thinks and goes about policies and policy-making? The contributions in this special issue show that they do, and that incumbents take them seriously. Crucially, the way the regime responds to policy demand determines their durability in office. Evidence provided in the individual articles show that organizational power matters (in the form of state capacity, party strength, and cohesion), and so does resorting to important levels of patronage (the pork barrel during elections). And yet, policy-making and the voters’ perceptions thereof also play an important, if understated, role in determining whether a regime collapses or survives.

We are interested in understanding why, despite strong similarities, the political regime ruling Armenia remained stable over the years (from the mid-1990s), whereas the one in Georgia has been unseated on two occasions (2003–2004 and 2012–2013). The articles shed light on how public policy influences political stability and instability. A common thread throughout the special issue is that despite some strong similarities (increased state capacity, willingness to rely on repression and co-optation) such divergent paths can be explained by the regimes’ policy choices and the divergent regime-voter dynamics these engendered. In Armenia, policies have been changing incrementally and hence, producing small gains or losses to large segments of the electorate. In contrast, Georgia’s ruling party launched large-scale transformative policies in 2004, which left sizable sections of the electorate dissatisfied. Thus, we argue that transformative policies increase voter dissatisfaction and contribute to the electoral defeat of the regime, whereas incremental policy change helps the regime to consolidate power through elections.

In other words, we show that authoritarian regimes do much more than survive or collapse (Art 2012; Fumagalli 2016a, 2016b; Pepinsky 2014). They collect information on voter preferences, and devise policies in response to them. Policy-making thus matters and is extremely consequential. Paradoxically, however, policy-making makes a difference in counter-intuitive ways. As Armenia’s case shows, a regime which refrains from making grand promises, or blatantly contradictory or unrealistic ones, has greater chances of surviving than those that set out to transform society, like Saakashvili’s Georgia. Ultimately, such policies backfire on those who launched them.

The articles included in this special issue of Caucasus Survey are the result of a collaborative project of Armenian and Georgian researchers, which examined regime-voter linkages and interactions in the South Caucasus. The project was conducted with the support of the Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN).

Key concepts and definitions

Of the various sub-types of authoritarianism, competitive authoritarian regimes have received a large amount of attention in recent years for a number of reasons, ranging from the availability of data, the possibility of conducting field research, and the more meaningful role of some authoritarian institutions (elections, parties, and parliaments) compared to non-competitive regimes (Brancati 2014; Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009). As scholarly conversations proceed in waves, after an initial interest in typologies (Brooker 2013; Ezrow and Frantz 2011; Linz 2000), attention has seemingly cemented around the study of democratic-looking institutions, such as elections, parties, and parliaments. Three elements of authoritarian institutions have received particular attention: their origins (why were they created in the first place?), how they operate (do they work differently from democracies?), and their effects (what purposes do they serve? Do they help maintain regime stability or do they foster change?) (Pepinsky 2014). In particular, the work of Magaloni (2008) and Gandhi (2008) on elections under authoritarian rule, of Brownlee (2007) about the degree of institutionalization of specific (party) organizations, and that of Brancati on the mechanisms through which elites retain power (2012) have done much to “dispel the notion that institutions such as parties, elections, and legislatures are exclusive to democracies” (2012, 2.12) or that they amount to mere window-dressing.

Following Levitsky and Way’s seminal work on the topic, we understand competitive authoritarian regimes as

civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents. Such regimes are competitive in that opposition parties use democratic institutions to contest seriously for power, but they are not democratic because the playing field is heavily skewed in favour of incumbents. Competition is real but unfair. (2010, 5)

Both Armenia and Georgia fit in this definition well and have tended to fit in this regime sub-type for a large part of the post-Soviet period; according to Freedom House, Armenia and Georgia mostly remained in the “partly free” category of countries (Freedom House 2017). This trend is largely confirmed by the Polity IV scores, where both countries have been “stuck” between democracy and autocracy since attaining independence from the Soviet Union (Polity IV Project 2015) (Figures 1 and 2).

Our main dependent variable is the regime’s political stability. We define stability as the regime’s ability to secure electoral victory for the incumbent or his designated political successor. We treat the incumbent’s electoral failure as political instability, though this may or may not lead to regime change. As we are interested in the factors that help sustain regime stability or cause regime instability and change, in our contributions we do not directly discuss the factors promoting or hindering democratization, since electoral change of the incumbent may or may not change regime type. One article in this special issue addresses the impact of state capacity on political stability. We define state capacity as the state’s ability to mobilize resources to implement the public policies it chooses and operationalize them through the estimation of relative political extraction, estimated based on actual extraction divided by predicted extraction (Arbetman-Rabinowitz et al. 2012, 17).

In competitive authoritarian regimes, voters have poor accountability mechanisms at their disposal: since the incumbent creates and retains a competitive advantage in elections, voters can do very little to hold elected officials accountable for their promises. Hence, voters become disillusioned with political participation, which is reflected in low partisanship and low levels of political participation. The disillusionment of voters creates an incentive for political parties, including the incumbent, to come up with vague and often contradictory promises to bring voters back to the polling stations. Such repeated interactions between the voters and parties create an accountability trap: voters cannot hold their elected officials accountable for their promises due to the ambiguity of promises and become further disillusioned with political participation.

Figure 1. Average score of political rights and civil liberties – Freedom House.

Figure 2. Polity IV scores.

While incumbents of competitive authoritarian regimes enjoy the benefits of an uneven playing field, they know they can be ejected from office. One way incumbents can stave off this outcome is providing goods to elites, who can deliver votes, to keep them inside their coalition; a second is providing goods to all such as property rights or public education (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005). However, goods given to the public, when they result from reform, create a mass of instant losers followed by winners over time. If a would-be reformer wants to retain office, they need to maintain the coalition which brought them there, meaning there must be more winners than losers. Given that elections are always approaching, reformers face a dilemma. If they cannot create more winners than losers before elections through reform, then they must coerce or co-opt those who select them, both elites and regular voters, or lose office. However, if reformers do choose to stay in office through less than savoury means, it is also likely that they have entered a self-defeating game, through the resulting volatility in state capacity. Co-opting elites before elections takes resources away from investing in state capacity, and hence the ability to deliver goods. Through the fluctuation in delivery of goods to elites and the general public, each group will become uncertain of whether they can expect goods in the future. Stemming from this uncertainty, a credible challenger can enter the electoral playing field and unseat the incumbent.

Competitive non-democratic rule in the South Caucasus

The countries of the South Caucasus provide an interesting vantage point from which to observe the functioning of competitive authoritarian regimes and the effects of policy-making on regime stability/instability. Apart from a limited period in the early 1990s during which some limited pluralism existed, Azerbaijan has emerged as an increasingly closed and non-competitive authoritarian regime centred around the exploitation of natural resource wealth and the establishment of a rentier economy (Radnitz 2012; Sultanova 2014). As such, it can only offer very limited insights into the debates at hand. By contrast, Armenia, Georgia, and even the de facto states of Abkhazia, Nagorny Karabakh, and to a very limited extent, South Ossetia have experienced various degrees of political instability.

For good reasons, much of the analysis on the region has been driven by research on conflict and the role of external powers explicitly (e.g. Babayan 2015; Gammer 2008; Geukjian 2012; Green and Waters 2010; Oskanian 2013; Saparov 2015) or indirectly, when examining nationalism and identity politics (e.g. Agadjanian, Jodicke, and van der Zweerde 2015; Ayoob and Ismayilov 2015; George 2009; Kemoklidze et al. 2014; Nodia 2014). In particular, the works of Zürcher (2007), de Waal (2010), and Jones (2010, 2013) have significantly enriched our understanding of conflictual dynamics in the region and the interaction between regional and external powers. Substantively, the contributions to this special issue differ from much of the scholarship on the South Caucasus in that they take a step back from the focus on nationalism, war and conflict, and the role of international powers. This is not because we deny their importance, but rather we feel that a fuller understanding of the politics of the region needs to take into consideration domestic policy-making and the linkages between domestic actors, and specifically elites and voters. More needs to be said about the role of local elites and especially the citizens of the two countries, their pref...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Taking partly free voters seriously: autocratic response to voter preferences in Armenia and Georgia
• 2 The self-defeating game: how state capacity and policy choice affect political survival
• 3 Elections and election fraud in Georgia and Armenia
• 4 Retrospective voting in Georgia: does the government’s past performance matter?
• 5 Promises, lies and the accountability trap. Evidence from a survey experiment in Armenia and Georgia
• 6 Balancing the three pillars of stability in Armenia and Georgia
• Index