The population of Georgia on “good citizenship”

Although many people agree that being “a good citizen” is important, there is a great variety of ideas on what being “a good citizen” means. CRRC’s 2013 and 2015 Caucasus Barometer (CB) surveys asked respondents to rate the importance of the following seven qualities for being “a good citizen”: always obeying laws, supporting the government on every occasion, voting in elections, following traditions, volunteering, helping people who are worse off than themselves, and being critical towards the government. This blog post discusses Georgia’s population’s assessments of these qualities.

As in previous years, of these seven qualities, helping people who are worse off and following traditions are reported to be the most important qualities of “a good citizen” in Georgia. Always obeying laws and voting are considered somewhat less, however, still quite important qualities. At the same time, supporting the government on every occasion or being critical towards the government are not reported to be as important.

In 2015, the seven qualities have been assessed slightly differently than in 2013. The largest change is a 12% decrease in the reported importance of supporting the government on every occasion. The assessment of importance of voting in elections has slightly decreased (by 7%), although almost within the margin of error, and the importance of helping people who are worse off has slightly increased (7%).

Note: A ten-point scale was used to record answers to these questions, where code ‘1’ corresponded to the answer “Not important at all” and code ‘10’ corresponded to the answer “Extremely important”. For this blog post, codes 1 through 4 were grouped as “Not important”, codes 5 and 6 as “Neither important nor unimportant” and codes 7 through 10 as “Important”. Only the shares of those assessing the respective quality as important (codes 7 through 10 of the original scale) are shown on the charts of this blog post. 

People living in the capital, other urban and rural settlements have slightly different views on what qualities a good citizen should have. Compared to the opinions of those living outside Tbilisi, voting, always obeying laws, volunteering and being critical towards the government are reported in the capital as more important, while supporting the government on every occasion – as less important. Following traditions, though, is considered highly important in all settlement types.

The data also shows that those who believe that, in general, people shape their fate themselves assign higher importance to such qualities of a good citizen as voting in elections, volunteering and being critical towards the government, compared to those who think that everything is determined by fate. The results of a Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test show, this finding is statistically significant.

Note: A ten-point scale was used to record answers to the question on fatalism. The original answers were recoded so that codes 1 through 5 were combined in the category “Everything is determined by fate” and codes 6 through 10 were combined in the category “People shape their fate themselves”.

Of the seven possible qualities of a “good citizen” offered in CRRC’s Caucasus Barometer survey, the population of Georgia assesses following traditions and helping those who are worse off as the most important ones. Assessments of most of the qualities of a good citizen slightly differ by settlement type. Notably, those who think that everything in life is determined by fate assign less importance to voting in elections, volunteering and being critical towards the government. For more data, visit our Online Data Analysis tool.