After gaining independence, Georgia had to face many challenges. One such challenge was political parties, changing and evolving with the formation or transformation of state institutions.

The history of modern Georgian political parties is a little over thirty years old. They were established, participated in elections, won or lost, and disappeared from the political field before our eyes.

A well-structured and effectively functioning political party is the basic institution of a democratic system and a precondition for the democratic development of the state. Without parties, the fundamental requirement of democracy - competitive elections - will not be met.

Consequently, for the existence and development of democracy in a state, it is essential that political parties operate on democratic principles. This means that processes within parties are transparent, party members are actively involved in party life, power within the party is decentralized, and responsibilities are evenly distributed among leaders, middle and lower echelons. Party politics is focused on voter preferences, while party members are in constant contact with the electorate.

High quality internal democracy is the foundation of the effective work of the party. Democratically elected candidates within the party will in the future become a source for the democratic functioning of other institutions in the state. A horizontally and vertically balanced political party, with well-developed intra-party democratic instruments and a functioning internal democracy, successfully fulfills its core task of representing the interests of a specific segment of the electorate and also effectively acting as a bridge between the government and citizens.

Political science includes three models of intra-party democracy:

The first model focuses on the selection of candidates through use of a specific, inclusive and competitive mechanism (eg, primaries) to compile party lists. The problem with this model is that it does not involve party members in policy-making and decision-making processes.

The second model focuses on the direct participation of party members. Under this model, a party member can participate in both policy-making and candidate selection. Party members are asked for their opinion on pre-determined issues or selected candidates. Some foreign parties use rotational schemes to select candidates to avoid distancing themselves from ordinary voters.

Both of the above models create a conducive environment for party elites to run the party at their own discretion. The elite decides what decision to make when forming a program or what strategy to choose to win the election. At the same time, both models use a mechanism of aggregation of preferences when communicating with the voters, through which the preferred candidate is identified and preferences are gathered from the voters. The goal of aggregation is for the political elite to be able to predict with high probability the final outcome of the election.

The third model of intra-party democracy offers a mechanism of deliberation or judgment to determine the agreed demands of the electorate. During the deliberation process, during the discussions with the party members and the voters, the preferences are filtered and the citizens are offered what will be acceptable to as many voters as possible. In fact, in the deliberative process, voters are able to overcome the dilemma of collective action and agree on specific issues.

The main idea of the deliberation model is that the vision is formed by participation in discussions. The larger number of participants in the discussion, the more complete the deliberation result.

It should be emphasized that deliberation within the party takes place on several levels: between the party elite and the middle class (these are the members of the party who are involved in the daily life of the party and lead the "policy-making" process in different directions); Between the middle class and ordinary members and between ordinary members and voters. Thus, several communication levels of deliberation are created. The third level is very important because the party member is in direct contact with the voter and receives information about his / her problems from the first source. Issues voiced by ordinary members are delivered to the middle class. Now it starts the deliberation process with both lower levels. Finally, the result of the deliberation is shared with the political elite. It is a process of bottom-up movement of preferences, in which the citizen is directly involved in the formation of the party program. Opinions are shared from top to bottom in the same manner.

The deliberation process not only enhances the degree of democracy, but also contributes to the creation and development of citizens' political knowledge in the reasoning process. Consequently, it is difficult to influence and manipulate the citizen's decision in the pre-election process, which, in turn, increases the accountability of participating politicians to the voters.

The study of the intra-party democracy of Georgian political parties reveals several problems that hang like a Sword of Damocles over the parties and prevent them from being established as a democratic institution.

The first problem is a centralized, vertically controlled party structure. The party elite makes autonomous decisions on all issues, including the selection of candidates. Second - the process of conducting politics in Georgian political parties is not be observed at all between elections. The choice of ideology is made formally. Moreover, in very rare cases, parties with a clear ideology change ideological principles in the pre-election period in order to increase the number of supporters.

Georgian parties are mainly leader-oriented. Therefore, they are fragile and dependent on one person. Due to this kind of construction, in case of failure in the elections, the party often disappears from the Georgian political field. For the long-term existence of the party, it is necessary to offer an effective program to the voters. The program-oriented party is structurally solid and stable. It should be emphasized, however, that the program alone cannot guarantee the success of a party. A leader and a challenge-focused program are weighty components of a political party's success.

Observation shows that one of the sources of inadmissibility of changes is the voter himself. He/she prefers to choose a name rather than a party. Citizens believe that a strong leader is an unconditional precondition for a party to win. One of the reasons for such attitudes towards citizens' parties is the lack of civic education. It is the scarcity of political knowledge that allows the Georgian political elite to make serious decisions without discussing them with ordinary party members. Citizens are not aware that the party is a channel through which they should talk to the government about their own interests, preferences and problems. The post-Soviet voter does not know that the party is an effective tool for him/her to influence the government.

Nor is the current electoral system in Georgia a promoter of intra-party democracy. Consequently, political parties are not motivated to form democratic intra-party structures. In fact, the party is active in the run-up to the elections to overcome the imposed threshold and receive budget funding.

It is crucial that the parties function in accordance with established formal procedures. For example, it is a formal pre-election practice to select candidates and select a leader to stand out from them. In the period between elections, policies should be actively made and submitted to party members. The budget of the party should be a well-calculated financial document, which transparently reflects the expenses for each event to be held and is available to any member of the party. Properly drafted shared financial document increases the degree of legitimacy of the budget in party members.

The last few elections have shown us that the biggest challenge is a long-term, day-to-day relationship with party voters. According to the deliberation model, it is necessary for the party's political elite to have discussions with the party’s middle and ordinary members, gatherings of various formats are acceptable - assembly, large or small party meetings, congresses at national or regional level, public meetings or door-to-door meetings. Digital technologies have created new tools for deliberation. They can be actively used by parties to disseminate information and increase the degree of transparency of party activities. Social networks make it easy for ordinary party members to communicate with the middle class and, if necessary, the party elite. The Internet also creates a favorable environment for ordinary voters to participate in party activities.

The party is a dynamic organism. Its functioning should not be interrupted in the periods between elections. It is between the elections that the importance of the activities of the members of the party in the middle circle of the party comes to the fore. They routinely interact with both the party elite and ordinary members. The middle circle communicates through ordinary members with voters to identify problems and sets citizen preferences, develops initiatives. In fact, the middle link is the party bureaucracy, which sets the direction of party development according to the interests of the supporters. It is the middle circle that sorts preferences according to complexity, time continuity, and priorities for resolution. The program presented to the voters before the elections are the policies developed by the middle circle.

Thirty years after declaring independence, Georgia still faces challenges that hinder its democratic development. The functioning of the internal institutions of political parties according to democratic principles, the decentralization of power between the party elite, middle circle and ordinary members of the party – these are the prerequisites for the stability of the parties and the democracy of the system as a whole. And then the party system governed by intra-party democracy itself becomes the promoter and guarantor of the democracy of the state institutions associated with it.