VOTER TURNOUT IN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS OF GEORGIA: DYNAMICS AND GEOGRAPHY
Keywords:
voter turnout, parliamentary elections, Georgia, factors of electoral activism, election districts.Abstract
Independent Georgia, despite its turbulent history didn’t discontinue its democratic development. After changes in the Constitution in 2010 Georgia became a parliamentary republic and election of its major legislative body is the most important political event in the country. The paper deals with analysis of main geographic, political, socio-economic, demographic, institutional factors affecting voter turnout (VT) in the parliamentary elections of Georgia from 1990 to 2020. Study of voters’ turnout is a way to analyze complicated political processes taking place in this country. A variety of factors shape electoral behavior of the Georgian society. So far two periods could be singled out according to electoral activism: 1990–2008 and 2010s-2020. First two decades of independence were characterized by a simultaneous decline of the number of population and the level of VT (the latter dropped by c. 14 percentage points, from 67.1% in 1990 to 53.4% in 2008). Since 2008 turnout level varies from 53% to 61%. Against all expectations during the last four parliamentary elections (2008, 2012, 2016, 2020) VT did not demonstrate steady decrease and number of voters remained more or less stable. Improvement of both election legislation and the administration of elections has resulted in the elimination of practice when voter turnout and support to the ruling party were artificially boosted. The main finding of the research is that the level of electoral activism in Georgia during country’s independence was determined by two main factors: mass emigration and “political stakes”. The research deals with following academic methods: collection-processing of the official data provided by Election Administration of Georgia, and its electoral-geographic analysis; critical review of academic works on the topic; GIS technologies for preparing and integrating maps through QGIS, and Adobe Illustrator for visual design of results. Keywords: voter turnout, parliamentary elections, Georgia, factors of electoral activism, election districts.References
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