Governing the Grey Zone: Why Hybrid Regimes in Europe’s Eastern Neighborhood Pursue Partial Governance Reforms

Every year the European Union, as well as numerous other international organizations, states, and transnational networks wield ample resources to promote democratic governance in the developing countries. However, the impact of these reform promotion efforts varies widely. Many scholars have blamed structural conditions, or the inadequate rewards offered by the donors, as the reasons behind the partial impact of external actors. However, such approach portrays recipient governments as passive objects of the external influence, and overlooks the fact that domestic actors can, themselves, actively subvert or facilitate the reforms. In this dissertation, Ketevan Bolkvadze addresses this gap, by departing from the literature on hybrid regimes, and by placing incumbents and their incentives structures at the forefront of the analysis. The three different studies in this thesis zero in on the hybrid regimes in Moldova and Georgia, and examine how political fragmentation and incumbent’s timehorizons shaped their response to the EU-promoted reforms. The findings from this dissertation show that the external actors are often caught between a rock and a hard place. When they provide assistance for reforms in dominant-party hybrid regimes, incumbents might use this to bolster their popular support, while, in parallel, side-lining their opponents. Thus, donor assistance might help them perpetuate their political tenure. By contrast, while in fragmented hybrid regimes authoritarian tendencies are not an immediate risk, incumbent politicians often use the existing malfunctioning state institutions – and even donor assistance - for reaping personal monetary benefits. In the first case, donor assistance ends up being used for partisan purposes; in the second case, it risks being used for private ends. Both are troubling outcomes

To Reform or to Retain? Politicians’ Incentives to Clean Up Corrupt Courts in Hybrid Regimes

This article offers a novel take on the problem of judicial independence in nondemocracies. Some scholars hold that political fragmentation leads to more judicial independence; others argue that it leads to less independence in nondemocracies. These studies have focused on judicial politicization and neglected judicial corruption. Using a process-tracing controlled comparison of reforms in Georgia and Moldova, I investigate the impact of political fragmentation on judicial corruption. I argue that politicians in less fragmented regimes, as in Georgia, have stronger incentives to reform corrupt courts, and utilize anticorruption measures for establishing long-term political control. In more fragmented regimes, as in Moldova, politicians have stronger incentives to resist anticorruption measures and instead utilize corrupt courts for short-term private gains. These findings suggest that political fragmentation in hybrid regimes can propel politicians to delegate neither more, nor less power to courts, but instead to use distinct avenues, or “entry-points,” to influence judicial outcomes

Democracy, Quality of Government, and Public Goods Provision: The Case of Water Management

A large strand of research has argued that democracy with its broad representation and electoral accountability is beneficial for the provision of public goods to the general population. However, there is a large variation in how the existing democratic regimes perform, implying that democratic institutions are not sufficient to secure people’s wellbeing. The aim of this paper is to explore the sources of this variation. With the point of departure in theories on democracy, quality of government, and public goods provision, we posit that the way democracies perform in the delivery of public goods to their citizens depends on the presence of good quality institutions that shape the implementation of public policies. Using a mixed method design, this paper both empirically tests this proposition and offers an in-depth investigation into the mechanisms behind the interdependent relationship. In the first stage of our analysis, we explicitly test the conditional effects of democracy and quality of government on public goods provision using water quality as an example of such public good. The results show that democracy is associated with higher water quality only in countries where quality of government is high. In contexts with low governmental quality, more democracy even seems to be associated with higher water pollution. In the second stage of our analysis, we proceed with examining the mechanisms of how poor quality of government disrupts the positive effects of democracy on people’s access to safe drinking water using interview data from a typical case of Moldova

Sons of the Soil or Servants of the Empire? Profiling the Guardians of Separatism in Abkhazia and South Ossetia

Who are the guardians of separatism in Abkhazia and South Ossetia? These de facto states can be seen as self-determination movements or as outgrowths of Russian imperialism. We arbitrate between these competing scripts using a dataset that profiles officials in charge of high politics decision-making inside Georgia’s separatist entities from 1992 through 2020 (N=608). We find that most are sons of the soil, though Abkhazia’s guardians are more multicultural than South Ossetia’s. Russian emissaries seized influential posts inside the self-declared republics after 2003 and, since then, sit in on Security Council meetings, thus rendering them incapable of autonomous decision-making

Fresh pipes with dirty water: How quality of government shapes the provision of public goods in democracies

A large strand of research holds that democracy with its broad representation and electoral accountability is beneficial for the provision of public goods. Yet, there is a large variation in how democracies perform, indicating that democratic institutions alone do not suffice for securing citizens’ wellbeing. Recent studies have stressed the equal importance of state capacity for public goods delivery. These studies, however, rarely investigate how the lack of state capacity mutes the effects of democratic institutions on public goods provision. This article addresses this gap by using a mixed methods design. First, the conditional effects of democracy and quality of government (QoG) are tested on the previously under‐researched domain of the provision of clean water. The results show that democracy is associated with higher water quality only in countries where QoG is high. If QoG is low, more democracy is even related to lower water quality. The second stage of the analysis proceeds by examining how poor QoG disrupts the effects of democracy on public access to safe drinking water using interview data from a typical case of Moldova. The analysis illustrates that democracy has a number of positive effects and incentivises politicians to focus on the visible aspects of water provision, including the expansion of the water pipe network. However, low QoG hampers adoption and implementation of long‐term policies necessary for securing an aspect of water provision that is harder to achieve – namely water quality. This leaves the fresh pipes with dirty water