Abstract
‘It doesn’t matter who votes, but who counts the votes’ (attributed to Joseph Stalin)2
Just as Georgia’s most infamous son expressed cynicism about elections, so too have observers of electoral practices in the contemporary South Caucasus. International and domestic organizations have bemoaned the prevalence of biased media coverage, arbitrary and opaque decision-making, as well as outright vote theft. Credible claims of improper practices have dogged presidential, parliamentary and local elections in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. But, public protest over unfair elections generally has been ignored or repressed.
The quote is from Eduard Shevardnadze, commenting on the unusually complex election rules adopted in 1992 (cited in an untitled report on Georgia of the United States Helsinki Commission/Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1992, 6).
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Notes
W. H. Riker, ‘The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: an Essay on the History of Political Science’, American Political Science Review, 76 (1982), p. 753.
M. Duverger, Political Parties (New York: Wiley, 1954).
L. D. Epstein, Political Parties in Western Democracies (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980).
See, for example, D. W. Rae, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971);
P. Ordeshook and O. Shvetsova, ‘Ethnic Heterogeneity, District Magnitude and the Number of Parties’, American Journal of Political Science, 38 (1994), p. 100;
O. Amorim Neto and G. W. Cox, ‘Electoral Institutions, Cleavage Structures, and the Number of Parties’, American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), p. 149.
R. Taagepera and M. S. Shugart, Seats and Votes: the Seats and Determinants of Electoral Systems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
and G. W. Cox, Making Votes Count (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
See, for example, S. Mozaffar and A. Schedler, ‘The Comparative Study of Electoral Governance — Introduction’, International Journal of Political Science, 23 (2002), pp. 5–27;
P. Jones Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
L. Massicotte, A. Blais and A. Yoshinaka, Establishing the Rules of the Game: Election Laws in Democracies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
E. S. Herron, ‘Political Actors, Preferences and Election Rule Re-design in Russia and Ukraine’, Democratization, 11 (2004), p. 41.
J. Elster, C. Offe and U. K. Preuss, Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
K. R. Benoit and J. W. Schiemann, ‘Institutional Choice in New Democracies: Bargaining over Hungary’s 1989 Electoral Law’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 13 (2) (2001), p. 159;
K. R. Benoit and J. Hayden, ‘Institutional Change and Persistence: the Evolution of Poland’s Electoral System, 1989–2001’, Journal of Politics, 66 (2) (2004), p. 396.
O. Shvetsova, ‘A Survey of Post-Communist Electoral Institutions: 1990–1998’, Electoral Studies, 18 (1999), p. 397 and E. S. Herron, ‘Too Many or Too Few Parties? The Implications of Electoral Engineering in Post-Communist States’, in N. A. Graham and F. Lindahl, eds, The Political Economy of Transition in Eurasia: Democratization and Liberalization in a Global Economy (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, forthcoming).
G. Chiesa, Transition to Democracy: Political Change in the Soviet Union 1987–1991 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993)
and D. Slider, ‘The October 1992 Elections in Georgia’, paper presented at the National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Phoenix, Arizona (19 November 1992).
D. Abele, ‘A Restive Soviet Georgia Goes to the Polls’, reprinted in W. H. White, Jr., ed., Report on Election Observations of the October 28, 1990 Soviet Georgian Elections (Washington, DC: American Bar Association, 1990).
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), Report on Georgia’s Parliamentary Elections, October 11, 1992 (Washington, DC: CSCE, 1992) and Slider, supra note 16. The party list ballot included rank-ordering of the three top choices and a point system to determine winners.
Central Electoral Commission of the Republic of Georgia (CEC), Results of the Elections to the Parliament of the Republic of Georgia (Mimeo: CEC, 1992). See also CSCE, 1992, ibid. and Slider, supra note 16.
International Society for Free Elections, Parliamentary and Presidential Elections in Georgia, November 1995 (Tbilisi: Meridian Publishers, 1996), pp. 14–15.
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Georgia: Parliamentary Elections, 31 October and 14 November 1999 (Warsaw: OSCE, 1999), p. 12.
International Organization for Migration (IOM), Case: Georgia, 1999 Parliamentary and 2000 Presidential Elections (Mimeo: IOM, 2000).
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Georgia: Parliamentary Elections, 2 November 2003 (Warsaw: OSCE, 2003), p. 10.
Ibid. at p. 10; International Republican Institute (IRI), Statement on the Georgian Parliamentary Elections, available online at http://www.iri.org/sp-georgia-folsom.asp; and E. A. Miller, ‘Smelling the Roses: Eduard Shevardnadze’s End and Georgia’s Future’, Problems of Post-Communism, 51 (2) (2004), pp. 1–10.
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Georgia: Partial Repeat Parliamentary Elections, 28 March 2004 (Warsaw: OSCE, 2004), p. 12.
Norwegian Helsinki Committee, Report from the Observation of the Parliamentary and Presidential Election of the Republic of Georgia (Oslo: Norwegian Helsinki Committee, 1995), p. 10.
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© 2005 Erik S. Herron and Irakli G. Mirzashvili
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Herron, E.S., Mirzashvili, I.G. (2005). ‘Georgians Cannot Help Being Original’: the Evolution of Election Rules in the Republic of Georgia. In: Waters, C.P.M. (eds) The State of Law in the South Caucasus. Euro-Asian Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230506015_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230506015_2
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