Publication Date

5-11-2026

Document Type

Senior Integrative Project

Abstract

This paper examines Georgia’s post-Soviet political development to explain why the country, once viewed as a leading candidate for democratic consolidation, has experienced sustained democratic erosion and shifting geopolitical alignment. Drawing on Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s theory of democratic consolidation, it argues that Georgia never fully achieved a consolidated democracy after independence, leaving key institutional arenas including civil society, political society, rule of law, state bureaucracy, and economic society, unevenly developed and vulnerable to elite capture. Through a historical and institutional analysis from 1991 to 2026, this paper traces how early failures in state formation, unresolved questions of stateness, and weak institutionalization created conditions for personalist and oligarchic influence to persist across successive governments.

The analysis demonstrates that after 2012, under Georgian Dream and the influence of Bidzina Ivanishvili, these structural weaknesses facilitated gradual democratic backsliding through executive aggrandizement, selective justice, and increasing informalization of state power. Rather than abrupt regime change, Georgia’s trajectory reflects incremental institutional erosion alongside the preservation of formal democratic procedures. The paper further shows how economic patronage networks and foreign policy ambiguity have reinforced elite dominance while enabling a gradual shift toward Russian alignment despite widespread public support for European integration. Ultimately, this study contributes to scholarship on hybrid regimes by demonstrating that democratic backsliding in unconsolidated democracies is best understood not as democratic collapse, but as the exposure and exploitation of incomplete consolidation within weakly institutionalized systems.

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The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author.