On 14 September, the Preference Matcher Consortium,
VAAs are web platforms that allow
users to compare their positions on a set of concrete policy issues with those
of parties or candidates in elections. They then provide their users with
visual displays showing their positions with respect to parties or candidates. The
Georgian VAA Xmamkvlevi, which can be loosely
translated from the Georgian as “Vote Survey”, asked Georgian voters to
position themselves on thirty issues using the categories “completely agree”,
“agree”, “somewhere in the middle”, “disagree”, “completely disagree” and “no
opinion”. It then matched their responses with the positions of the eight
largest political parties in Georgia. These positions had already been
determined by a panel of experts from Ilia State University in Tbilisi. The
issues related to economic policy, relations with the West and Russia, the role
of the Church and gay rights, amongst other topics. Xmamkvlevi provided its
users with three displays: (1) a bar chart comparing users' proximity to all
parties based on all thirty VAA items; (2) a two-dimensional map, based on
users' responses to selected items that were deemed to “belong” to a particular
ideological dimension (economic left versus right and liberal versus
conservative), and (3) a bar chart that indicated how other users who answered
the thirty items in a similar way intend to vote. This third feature depended
on another attribute of Xmamkvlevi; by means of supplementary questions it
collected (anonymous) data from users on age, gender, education, political
interest, party identification and vote intention. These supplementary questions
had options that included “I do not intend to vote”, “I am undecided” and “I
prefer not to say”.
The purpose of VAAs such as
Xmamkvlevi is twofold. First, they help undecided voters decide how to vote
and, in less established democracies such as Georgia, provide voters,
politicians and political parties with incentives to consider matters of policy.
In former Soviet republics such as Georgia, scholars have often assumed that voters
are either to be drawn to charismatic leaders (of which Georgia’s former
president Mikheil Saakashvili is a prime example) (Enyedi
2006) or simply vote for the party or leader that will provide (or promises
to provide) material goods to their village or family (Stefes,
2006). The normative rationale of a VAA is to contribute to competitive and
programmatic politics by counteracting this tendency. Promoted through
advertising on Facebook, Xmamkvlevi was accessed by a relatively large number
of voters. According to Google Analytics, 13,510 users accessed the site and
meaningful data were obtained from 10,531 users. This should be considered a
rather large number given that the number of registered voters in Georgia is
just 3.5 million, VAAs are not well-known and Internet use in Georgia, although
growing fast, is far from universal. The relatively high uptake rate suggests
that policies matter for Georgian voters and this sends a clear message to
Georgian politicians that their policy positions (insofar as they have any)
will either appeal to or repel voters.
Second, VAAs provide the researcher
with a wealth of data on voters' political preferences. Provided due care is
taken to control for the fact that the data is self-selected, and therefore not
representative, this data can help us to address some of the core research
questions in political science. In this respect Xmamkvlevi has provided some
fascinating insights into whether Georgian voters choose parties according policy
or ideology and, if they do, what are the main dimensions of political
competition that divide them. Drawing on a subsample of approximately 4,500
users from the Xmamkvlevi data that were representative of the population as a
whole in terms of vote intention (using “abstainers” and undecided users as a
proxy for the 49% of the population who did not turn out to vote), I carried
out a dimension reduction technique called Mokken Scale Analysis to identify
latent political dimensions. This showed that a single ideological dimension
appeared to split Xmamkvlevi users. One pole of this dimension is represented
by those who take a conservative position on social-moral issues such as gay
rights, believe in a greater role for the Georgian Orthodox Church, oppose integration
with the EU and the West more generally and adopt a statist position with
regard to the economy. Those that cluster around the opposite pole, on the
other hand, are more liberal on social-moral issues, feel that the Church
already has enough power, strongly favour integration with the West and support
free market economic policies.
Interestingly, this dimension differs
radically from the traditional left-right dimension that is used to explain
political competition in Western Europe. In Georgia social conservatism is
associated with the economic left,
while a liberal or progressive position on moral-cultural issues is associated
with the economic right. This largely
conforms to the findings by Gary Marks and his colleagues that the economic and
cultural axes of political competition correlate in a different way in much of
post-communist Europe than in Western Europe (Marks et al., 2006). A possible
explanation for this is that the multiple transformations that many
post-communist societies have undergone in the past twenty-five years as a
result of economic transformation from a state-run to a market-run economy and
more recently of both economic and cultural globalisation has created a divide between
“winners” and “losers” of globalisation that is even deeper than that
identified by Hanspeter Kriesi and his colleagues in western Europe (Kriesi
et al., 2006). According to this logic, the so-called “winners” embrace the
liberal economic and cultural changes that globalisation brings, while “losers”
reject these changes.
Even more interesting is the fact
that those users who self-identified as party supporters by declaring that they
identified with a particular party and
that they were going to vote for that party occupy distinctive niches along
that dimension. The graphs below show density maps of the supporters of the
three parties that at the time of writing appeared to have overcome the 5
percent electoral barrier required to enter parliament through the party lists
(party lists provide 77 out of 150 seats, while the remaining seats are elected
by means of a majoritarian system over up to two rounds). These three parties
are the governing Georgian Dream party (GD in the graph), which appears to have
won a majority in parliament, the main opposition United National Movement
(UNM, in second place) and the small pro-Church Alliance of Patriots of Georgia
(PAT). The graph clearly show that the three groups of party supporters have
common ideological characteristics with supporters of the Alliance of Patriots
of Georgia closest to the (economic) left, conservative pole, supporters of the
UNM closer to the right-liberal pole and supporters of the governing party
rather closer to the middle, but tending towards the left-conservative pole.
This suggests that Georgian politics is not only a struggle for power and
resources, but that ideology also matters, especially amongst the rather
well-educated sectors of society that used this online application.
