The Dutch Centre for Political Participation (Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek - IPP) is implementing a project in Georgia to strengthen party democracy by supporting five opposition parties and the government party to formulate electoral manifestos. This summer six workshops have been organised in Tbilisi, one for each of the participating parties. In these workshops IPP trainers informed participants on the relevance and importance of party political programs and electoral manifestos. They made the parties express their views on current national issues clearly and unambiguously, by using the instrument of the VoteMatch.
The VoteMatch consists of a series of statements on relevant political issues in the election campaign, meticulously taken from party electoral programmes, on which respondents are asked to agree or disagree. In the end the respondent gets an ‘advice’, stating the distance between his/her political views and those of the political parties involved. It stands to reason that a precondition for this VoteMatch is that the views of the political parties on several issues differ sufficiently.
Main goal of the project is to help the parties to distinguish themselves politically, so that voters can make political instead of just personal choices in elections. In Georgia traditionally political campaigns are focussed on personalities rather than on conflicting political views.
Since summer the different parties have experimented with their own VoteMatch. Party members can thus compare their opinions with those of the party elite. In November IPP organises a new series of workshops to discuss the results of these experiments within the parties and to support further development of electoral manifestos.
Activities of IPP in Georgia are part of a more comprehensive project in that country by the Netherland Institute for Multiparty Democracy (NIMD).
For more information on this project contact: Jérôme Scheltens, j.scheltens@publike-politiek.nl.
Jérôme Scheltens, IPP (Dutch Centre for Politcal Participation)