Election Campaigning: The Case of Georgia

Abstract Preparing for elections during election campaigning has been topical in every era. In the 19th century, new methods for carrying out election campaigns were developed in the United States. The Americanization of election campaigns is characterized by political personalization, the special role of the media in a pre-election period, brittle ideological grounds and particular specialization of the political campaign. A plethora of different concepts have been coined to explain this process, including ‘Americanization’ and ‘professionalization’. As the uS is identified as the origin of election campaigning trends, these assumed convergences came to be known in academic writing as ‘Americanization’. Election campaigning was in need of professionals hired to navigate the campaign’s strategy. With the emergence of campaign advisors, the term ‘professionalization’ was introduced. In Georgia, the first steps on the way to statehood were made at the beginning of the 1990s, following the 70 years of Soviet rule. in post-Soviet Georgia, multiparty and competitive elections enabled political parties to use foreign experience in political campaigning. The goal of the present article is to define the existing election campaign model in Georgia, and especially, to examine the tendencies of Americanization in the election campaigns in Georgia in the period of 1990–2016. According to the research hypothesis, the weak institutionalization of the party system creates a favorable ground for the Americanization of political campaigning. in the 1990s, the weak representativeness of Georgian parties played an important role in political campaigning since the very beginning. in the research process, the characteristics of political campaigns in post-Soviet Georgia were analyzed. This study makes use of qualitative research methods, including: (a) expert interviews with political consultants; (b) in-depth interviews with representatives of political parties; and (c) in-depth interviews with the selected electorate. Qualitative research methods were chosen for the work for the purpose of understanding the tendencies of the Americanization of election campaigning in Georgia from the respondents’ perspective. Qualitative methods are more explicit and descriptive, and by gathering responses like these, it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of the subject.