Happy holidays 2018

This year, CRRC-Georgia’s carried out a wide variety of research on Georgia as well as the South Caucasus. If you’re looking for a social science read or a new dataset to play with over the holidays, here’s a few from CRRC-Georgia from 2018.

1. Knowledge and Attitudes of the Population of Georgia towards the Judiciary

What does the public think of the judiciary? Have the reforms of the Georgian Dream government led to increased trust in the courts?  This report looks at the knowledge and attitudes of the population towards the judiciary and changes between 2014 and 2018. To read the full report (in Georgian), click here, and to read a briefer version in English, click here. To explore the data, click here.

2. Countering Violent Extremism in Georgia: A Needs Assessment

This year, CRRC-Georgia carried out a needs assessment of communities that have lost members to the conflicts in Syria and Iraq. The needs assessment asked two primary questions. 1) What distinguishes communities that have lost members to the conflict and have not that are otherwise similar? 2) What do people in communities that have lost members to the conflict want for their communities? To answer these questions, CRRC-Georgia used a matching algorithm to identify the most similar communities in the country to those that have lost members and carried out a survey in both types of communities. To see what we found, click here for the report and dataset.

3. Anti-western Propaganda Barometer

What’s the far right talking about in Georgia? LGBT people. Well, not only that, but really, they are talking a lot about LGBT people, according to the new dashboard CRRC-Georgia built in 2018 which provides weekly updates and analysis of what far right groups are talking about on Georgian language Facebook using a variety of machine learning tools. To explore the data, click here.

4. Elections, elections, elections

On Sunday December 16, Georgia’s first directly elected female president Salome Zourabouchvili was sworn into office after winning in a second round run-off. During the first round of elections, Senior Policy Analyst David Sichinava and Researcher Rati Shubladze built pollster.ge, which provided analysis similar to Nate Silver’s 538 in the lead up to the elections. One aspect of the campaign that was widely commented on was its negativity. For the second round, in an article for OC-Media, Koba Turmanidze explained the phenomenon by pointing out that it likely worked, at least for the opposition. On election night, Deputy Research Director Dustin Gilbreath gave his hot take on the elections to Euronews, and David Sichinava summed up the elections the following morning also on Euronews.

5. Citizen Participation in Policy Formulation at the Local Level

Have a decentralization wonk in your life? Well, this is the report for them. As Georgia continues towards devolving powers to local administrations, CRRC-Georgia prepared this report on citizens’ participation in local government in Georgia to help inform local government efforts to transition into a more empowered role in citizens’ lives. To read the report (in Georgian), click here.

From CRRC-Georgia, we wish you a happy holiday season, and Social Science in the South Caucasus will be back in January. To stay up to date with what’s happening at CRRC-Georgia, follow us on Facebook or sign up for our monthly newsletter Data Bites.