PONARS Eurasia
  • About
    • Contact
    • Membership
      • All Members
      • Core Members
      • Collegium Members
      • Associate Members
      • About Membership
    • Ukraine Experts
    • Executive Committee
  • Policy Memos
    • List of Policy Memos
    • Submissions
  • Podcasts
  • Online Academy
  • Events
    • Past Events
  • Recommended
  • Ukraine Experts
Contacts

Address
1957 E St NW,
Washington, DC 20052

adminponars@gwu.edu
202.994.5915

NEWSLETTER
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Podcast
PONARS Eurasia
PONARS Eurasia
  • About
    • Contact
    • Membership
      • All Members
      • Core Members
      • Collegium Members
      • Associate Members
      • About Membership
    • Ukraine Experts
    • Executive Committee
  • Policy Memos
    • List of Policy Memos
    • Submissions
  • Podcasts
  • Online Academy
  • Events
    • Past Events
  • Recommended
  • Ukraine Experts
DIGITAL RESOURCES
digital resources

Bookstore 📚

Knowledge Hub

Course Syllabi

Point & Counterpoint

Policy Perspectives

RECOMMENDED
  • The Russia Program at GW (IERES)

    View
  • The Evolving Concerns of Russians after the Invasion | New Voices on Eurasia with Sasha de Vogel (March 9)

    View
  • PONARS Eurasia Spring Policy Conference (March 3)

    View
  • Ukrainathon 2023 (Feb. 24-25)

    View
  • How Putin has shrugged off unprecedented economic sanctions over Russia’s war in Ukraine – for now

    View
RSS PONARS Eurasia Podcast
  • The Putin-Xi Summit: What's New In Their Joint Communique ? February 23, 2022
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman speaks with Russian China experts Vita Spivak and Alexander Gabuev about the February meeting between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and what it may tell us about where the Russian-Chinese relationship is headed.
  • Exploring the Russian Courts' Ruling to Liquidate the Memorial Society January 28, 2022
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with scholars Kelly Smith and Benjamin Nathans about the history, achievements, and impending shutdown of the Memorial Society, Russia's oldest and most venerable civic organization, and what its imminent liquidation portends for the Russian civil society.
  • Russia's 2021 census and the Kremlin's nationalities policy [Lipman Series 2021] December 9, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with social scientist Andrey Shcherbak about the quality of the data collected in the recent population census and the goals of Vladimir Putin's government's nationalities policy
  • Active citizens of any kind are under threat [Lipman Series 2021] November 5, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Alexander Verkhovsky about the Kremlin's ever expanding toolkit against political and civic activists, journalists, and other dissidents.
  • Russia's Legislative Elections followup [Lipman Series 2021] October 4, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Tanya Lokot and Nikolay Petrov about the results of Russia’s legislative elections and about what comes next.
  • Why Is the Kremlin Nervous? [Lipman Series 2021] September 14, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Ben Noble and Nikolay Petrov about Russia’s September 17-19 legislative elections, repressive measures against electoral challengers, and whether to expect anything other than preordained results.
  • Vaccine Hesitancy in Russia, France, and the United States [Lipman Series 2021] August 31, 2021
    In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast episode, Maria Lipman chats with Denis Volkov, Naira Davlashyan, and Peter Slevin about why COVID-19 vaccination rates are still so low across the globe, comparing vaccine hesitant constituencies across Russia, France, and the United States.  
  • Is Russia Becoming More Soviet? [Lipman Series 2021] July 26, 2021
      In a new PONARS Eurasia Podcast episode, Maria Lipman chats with Maxim Trudolyubov about the current tightening of the Russian political sphere, asking whether or not it’s helpful to draw comparisons to the late Soviet period.
  • The Evolution of Russia's Political Regime [Lipman Series 2021] June 21, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Grigory Golosov and Henry Hale about the evolution of Russia's political regime, and what to expect in the lead-up to September's Duma elections.
  • Volodymyr Zelensky: Year Two [Lipman Series 2021] May 24, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Sergiy Kudelia and Georgiy Kasianov about Ukrainian President Zelensky's second year in office, and how he has handled the political turbulence of the past year.
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

Are Elections Bad for Georgia’s Democracy?

  • October 24, 2021
  • Stephen F. Jones

(PONARS Eurasia Commentary) Georgia’s politics has always been operatic, a blend of comedy and tragedy. Like opera, it is a performance for and by elites. The latest drama was the secret arrival in Georgia of Mikheil Saakashvili, who, on the eve of crucial municipal elections in Georgia, was detained by Georgian police and dispatched to prison in the provincial city of Rustavi. Runoffs in the country’s major cities are to take place at the end of this month. He faces years behind bars for crimes (abuse of power) allegedly committed when he was president (2004-2013). Writing from his cell, Saakashvili, who is in poor health due to a hunger strike, claimed he came back “to help our people restore freedom and democracy.” Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili insisted Saakashvili’s real purpose was to overthrow the government in a planned mass demonstration on October 3.

The Georgian saga goes on. Oversized dramatis personae have dominated the stage for the last thirty years: Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Eduard Shevardnadze, Saakashvili, and lastly, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili—all former presidents or prime ministers. They all created parties that, despite claims they would improve democratic representation and accountability to citizens, degraded into dominant one-party regimes that sustained power by infiltrating the economy, managing the judiciary, extending patronage networks, and ensuring command over electoral resources.

One-Party Systems

This is not a pattern unique to Georgia. Dominant one-party systems have emerged elsewhere in promising democracies like Hungary and Poland. In Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has governed the country largely unchallenged since World War II. We see versions of a single-party hegemony at the state level in the United States, where partisan gerrymandering proves that if you control the legislature and state resources, you can manipulate election rules, electoral districts, and even the judiciary to make your party practically immovable.

Despite these systemic flaws, we sold our electoral practice to Georgia, and with it, the delusion that it would make the Georgian legislature and its government more accountable and more democratic. Yet over the last thirty years of Georgian independence, despite or perhaps because of persistent changes to electoral rules (no Georgian election has taken place under the same electoral code), elections have only increased popular distrust of government. National parliamentary elections, rather than making politicians accountable, stimulating greater participation, or channeling politics into a consensual public space, have led to revolutions, boycotts, and polarization. Freedom House, a U.S.-based non-profit which measures democracy in states around the world, writes that “free and fair elections are a foundational component of political freedom.” Yes, perhaps, but are they a defining feature of democracy? Even the U.S. embassy in Georgia, in a harsh assessment of the October 2 elections, declared “the election process is about more than Election Day.”

Quasi-Democratic Elections

Paradoxically, U.S. elections increasingly resemble those in Georgia (we thought it would be the other way round). They are deeply unfair in both countries, plagued by the power of money and enormous economic and educational inequalities among voters. Access to the media is inequitable, populist messaging dominates the airwaves, and social media works on its hidden persuasion. Limited choice (despite multiple small parties in Georgia), the manipulation of electoral rules, and the lack of outcomes generate disillusion and low turnouts (51.4 percent in the Georgian October 2 election).

Given all this, why do the EU and the United States continue to insist that elections are the linchpin in Georgia’s democracy? Have elections led to greater accountability and greater control by Georgia’s citizens? Do citizens participate in decision-making? There is little evidence that they do. Georgia’s electoral system consistently fails its citizens. The lack of responsive parties and overblown party rhetoric adds to the problem. Georgia’s parties mobilize crowds, generate indignation, and insult their opponents, leading to polarization and non-cooperation. Polls show that citizens’ knowledge of what the parties are actually offering is very low. To revert to the opera metaphor—Georgian party leaders resemble “heroic” caricatures, singing with librettos that have no connection to the real world of their constituents.

Open Democracy?

Over the last three decades, Western democracy aid in Georgia has focused on elections as the instrument for expanding democracy. But elections, despite multiple attempts at reform and millions of aid dollars to Georgian parties, have proven inadequate. In 2021, Georgia was still in Freedom House’s “partly free” category. It is time to rethink.

More than a century ago, the leaders of the first Georgian republic (1918-21) proposed an imaginative alternative to parliamentary politics. They called it a “democratic republic,” which would implement “people’s political self-government.” The people, through its representatives, would not only make laws but participate “in the implementation of laws.” Power would not be “gathered by the center, but … divided between the center and the periphery.” The ideas never came to fruition due to the Russian civil war and Bolshevik intervention, but the notion of citizen self-government was a central tenet in the state’s institutional structure.

This idea has taken on new energy in recent decades, stimulated by an increasingly unequal system where access to power and economic opportunity have become sources of popular resentment and political instability. Georgia is a prime example. Hélène Landemore of Yale University, building on concepts of “popular power” and deliberative democracy, has proposed a system of “open democracy” in which the minority of professionalized politicians would be checked and balanced by a majority of ordinary citizens, who would guide and participate in government policy. She points to examples of “open democracy” in Belgium, Ireland (Citizens’ Assemblies), Iceland (where a new constitution was drawn up by over 900 of Iceland’s citizens), and even the United States, where a Citizens Initiative Review in Oregon determines which ballot questions are presented to Oregon’s citizens.

A New Approach is Needed

Every place is different. Georgia is not Iceland—and even in Iceland, the citizen-based constitutional changes were halted by Iceland’s parliament—but in opinion polling, Georgia’s parties persistently rank low on the scale of public trust. If U.S. agencies and the EU want to keep Georgia in the democratic camp, then they should offer strong incentives to parliament (and to parties that are willing to cooperate) to work with Georgia’s active civil society organizations to create new citizen-based institutions. Landemore calls them “mini-publics,” or public bodies where ordinary citizens deliberate, check, expose, and instruct—whether it is town planning, environmental control, judicial appointments, or constitutional changes.

The October 2021 elections and the recent spectacle provided by Georgian Dream and the United National Movement are just the latest illustration of why Georgia needs new citizen-based participatory institutions to ensure popular participation and control. Only on that basis will we see a strong and sustainable democracy in Georgia.

Stephen F. Jones is Professor at Mount Holyoke College and incoming Director of the Program on Georgian Studies at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Disclosure: although fully independent, the Program receives funding from the Georgian government.

Image credit/license

Related Topics
  • Georgia
  • Jones
Previous Article
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

Strengthening Ukraine’s Black Sea Navy to be a Bulkhead Against Russia

  • October 22, 2021
  • Borys Kormych and Tetyana Malyarenko
View
Next Article
  • Policy Memos | Аналитика

U.S. Foreign Policy: What Wins Hearts and Minds in Ukraine?

  • October 25, 2021
  • Mikhail Alexseev
View
You May Also Like
View
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

The Russia Program at GW (IERES)

  • PONARS Eurasia
  • March 10, 2023
View
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем
  • Uncategorized

The Evolving Concerns of Russians after the Invasion | New Voices on Eurasia with Sasha de Vogel (March 9)

  • PONARS Eurasia
  • March 5, 2023
View
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

PONARS Eurasia Spring Policy Conference (March 3)

  • PONARS Eurasia
  • March 2, 2023
View
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

Ukrainathon 2023 (Feb. 24-25)

  • PONARS Eurasia
  • February 21, 2023
View
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

How Putin has shrugged off unprecedented economic sanctions over Russia’s war in Ukraine – for now

  • Peter Rutland
  • February 21, 2023
View
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

The Determinants of Assistance to Ukrainian and Syrian Refugees | New Voices on Eurasia with Volha Charnysh (Feb. 16)

  • PONARS Eurasia
  • February 13, 2023
View
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

Why Still Pro-Russia? Making Sense of Hungary’s and Serbia’s Pro-Russia Stance

  • Marlene Laruelle and Helena Ivanov
  • February 9, 2023
View
  • Commentary | Комментарии
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

The Desire to Possess: Russia’s War for Territory

  • Irina Busygina
  • February 8, 2023
PONARS Eurasia
  • About
  • Membership
  • Policy Memos
  • Recommended
  • Events
Powered by narva.io

Permissions & Citation Guidelines

Input your search keywords and press Enter.