Awareness of EU aid and support for EU membership in Georgia

The EU provides a wide variety of aid to Georgia. Within the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI) alone, EUR 452.1 million was allocated for Georgia in 2007-2013. What, if any, role does this aid play in influencing the population’s attitudes towards the European Union? This blog post looks at the awareness of the population of Georgia about the EU’s aid to the country, on the one hand, and support for Georgia’s membership in the EU, on the other hand, using the 2015 CRRC/EF survey on Knowledge of and Attitudes towards the EU in Georgia (EU survey). The findings suggest that those who are more aware of EU aid are also more likely to support Georgia’s membership in the EU.

About 1/10th (13%) of the population of Georgia think the EU does not assist Georgia in any way, while about a third (31%) could not or would not answer the question, “In your opinion, what are the main types of aid the EU currently provides to Georgia?” Of the 56% who named a specific type of aid, humanitarian aid and investment in Georgia’s economy were the most frequent answers.

Note: A show card was used. The answers do not add up to 100% since respondents could choose up to three answer options. 

This question was recoded for further analysis. In a new variable, “Does the EU provide any aid to Georgia?”, all answers where a certain type of aid was mentioned were combined into the category “The EU provides aid,” while options “[The EU] does not provide any aid”, “Don’t know” and “Refuse to answer” were combined into the category “Don’t know/Does not provide aid.”

As the 2015 EU Survey report and CRRC’s previous blog posts have highlighted, in 2015, 61% of the population of Georgia reported that they would vote for the country’s membership in the EU, if a referendum was held tomorrow. Seventy-five percent of those saying that the European Union provides any type of aid to Georgia report that they would vote for EU membership. Only 44% of those saying the EU does not provide aid or answered “Don’t know” report the same.

The 56% of the population who named a specific type of aid that, in their opinion, Georgia receives from the EU, were then asked which groups benefit most from this aid. Politicians and high level officials in Georgia were named most often as the group that benefits most from EU aid to the country.

Note: The question was asked only to those who reported that the EU provides aid to Georgia. A show card was used for this question. The answers do not add up to 100% since respondents could choose up to two answer options. 

These findings suggest that awareness about EU aid to Georgia matters when it comes to people’s support for Georgia’s membership in the EU. Those who believe that the EU provides specific types of aid to Georgia tend to report more often that they would vote for Georgia’s membership in the EU.

To learn more about the population’s support for Georgia’s membership in the EU, visit CRRC’s Online Data Analysis tool, or take a look at some of CRRC-Georgia’s blog posts on the subject, here.

Who is more intelligent and sincere? CRRC interviewers’ assessments

It has been only about two decades since pollsters started using paradata, including interviewer assessments of the conducted interviews and respondents’ behavior and attitudes. Such assessments are collected in the process of most of CRRC-Georgia’s surveys. Immediately after each interview, interviewers are asked to assess various aspects of the interview, including respondents’ sincerity and intelligence. Using CRRC’s 2015 Caucasus Barometer (CB) data for Armenia and Georgia, this blog post explores how such assessments differ depending on respondents’ demographic characteristics and their households’ economic situations.

It is important to highlight that these assessments can hardly provide reliable information about the actual intelligence or sincerity of respondents, and there is no doubt that interviewers’ perceptions of intelligence are very subjective, thus they cannot be attributed to any objective characteristics. Still, when analyzed properly, they can tell us a lot about a wide range of issues, from the process of interviews to the dominant stereotypes and biases in a given society.

In the CB 2015 assessment forms, interviewers were asked to rate respondents’ intelligence. In both Armenia and Georgia, interviewers tend to rate the intelligence of people who live in the capital and other urban settlements higher than the intelligence of those who live in villages.

 Note: The original 5-point scale was recoded for the charts in this blog post, with answer options “Intelligent” and “Very intelligent” combined into the category “Intelligent” and answer options “Not at all intelligent” and “Not very intelligent” combined into the category “Not intelligent”. Responses “Don’t know” and “Refuse to answer” were excluded from the analysis in the charts in this blog post.

Although, overall the respondents are reported to be rather sincere during the interviews, interviewers report the answers of people living in the capital and other urban settlements to be slightly more sincere compared to the answers of people living in villages.

Note: The original 11-point scale was recoded for the charts in this blog post, with codes 0 through 3 combined into the category “Not sincere”, codes 4 through 6 combined into “Average” and codes 7 through 10 combined into the category “Sincere”. 

There are even more pronounced differences by respondents’ level of education. Interviewers rate people with a lower level of formal education both as less intelligent and sincere. In both countries, people who report having secondary technical education or secondary or lower education are twice as likely to be placed in the category “Average” than those with a higher than secondary education.

 Note: Answer options “No primary education”, “Primary education”, “Incomplete secondary education” and “Secondary education” were grouped into the category “Secondary or lower”; “Incomplete higher education”, “Completed higher education” and “Post-graduate degree” were grouped into the category “Higher than secondary”. 

In contrast to the assessments of intelligence, interviewers’ assessments of respondents’ sincerity vary less by the respondents’ level of education. Both these assessments, however, are very similar in Armenia and Georgia.

Interviewers’ assessments of respondents’ intelligence and sincerity also differ according to the reported economic situation of the respondent’s household. Interviewers tend to perceive those who are better-off economically as more intelligent. For example, interviewers report people living in households that can afford to buy expensive durables to be intelligent almost three times more often than people who do not have enough money for food, in both Armenia and Georgia.

Note: Answer options “We can afford to buy some expensive durables [like a refrigerator or washing machine]” and “We can afford to buy anything we need” were grouped into the category “Enough money for expensive durables”.

Those who report being in the best economic situation tend to be rated as sincere more often than people in all other groups.

Further research is needed to find out to what extent interviewer assessments reflect the actual situation, i.e. whether those who are better off, or urban dwellers, are actually more intelligent or sincere, and vice versa. The findings presented in this blog post show that interviewers have rather strong opinions about what groups of respondents are intelligent and sincere, and the assessments are very similar in Armenia and Georgia. Interestingly, there is a high positive correlation between the assessments of respondents’ intelligence and sincerity in both countries, suggesting another interesting topic for further research, namely, to what extent intelligence and sincerity are seen by interviewers as interrelated characteristics.

To find out more about CRRC’s Caucasus Barometer and other surveys, check out our online data analysis tool.

Air Pollution in Tbilisi: What the Data Says

[Note: This is a guest blog post by Dr. Hans Gutbrod, the former Director of CRRC.]

With the recent debate on traffic safety, it may also be a good time to highlight the issue of air pollution in Tbilisi – especially as municipal elections are coming up, and citizens (and candidates) may ask themselves what issues the election should focus on.

The data is clear: citizens care about pollution and the environment. In the June 2016 survey that CRRC conducted for NDI-Georgia, pollution was seen as a key concern for residents of Tbilisi. In the capital, 38% named it as one of the most important infrastructural issues, placing it ahead of all other issues related to infrastructure. In general, all generations care, but the young a bit more. In Tbilisi, about 40% of those under 36 years of age mentioned pollution as an issue compared to 32% of those 56 and older.

Politically, the topic also seems to resonate, though less strongly with voters who tend towards the big parties. Only 33% of Georgian Dream voters and 35% of United National Movement voters reported that pollution was the number one infrastructural issue in Tbilisi (Note: the party landscape has changed since the survey). This may in part be a result of the small sample size once you do crosstabs, but could also suggest that the environment and pollution may be an issue to mobilize and rally voters around. Supporting this contention is the fact that 40% of undecided voters in Tbilisi named the issue as the most important one in Tbilisi.

Yet how bad is the situation really? It is not so easy to find out. The government does collect data at three measuring stations that have been donated by Japan, but it is made available one day late, in PDFs, and even those who have interpreted lots of data will need a significant amount of time to decipher what is going on.

A very quick glance on some random days in February suggests that the pollution in Tbilisi repeatedly exceeds limits that are considered healthy – often by a multiple.

Whatever the policy prescription, one sensible next step for citizens and parties to demand, and for the government to take, is to make this data accessible straightaway, live. Having the data, citizens could decide on what to expose themselves to, when. To have a good debate on policy, we need good data. Thus, a sensible suggestion to politicians whenever and wherever you meet them is to request that public pollution data be made available in real time.

Debts and Loans in Georgia (Part 2)

The first part of this blog post showed that people who report being in a worse economic situation are more likely to have debts in Georgia. In the second part of this blog post, a new variable is added to the analysis, “Does anyone owe you any money?”

While 46% of the population of Georgia report having debt, only 20% report that someone owes them money. In the latter, group, there are no differences by gender and settlement type, but there are differences by age. People between 36 and 55 years of age are more likely to say that someone owes them money. As seen in the first part of this blog post, people in this age group are also most likely to report they have personal debts.

The cross tabulation of the questions about having debt and being owed money shows that people who are owed money are slightly more likely to have debts.

A new variable, “Debts and Loans,” was created to group people into four categories based on the two CB questions discussed above.

Forty four percent of the population of Georgia are part of the largest group who report neither having debts nor being owed any money. These people are neither better off nor worse off compared to the population on average. The second largest group has debts but no one owes them money. They appear to be in the worst economic situation, with the greatest share of people saying they do not have enough money for food and for clothes in comparison to other groups. The two smallest groups are people who say someone owes them money. The two groups who have no debts appear to be in a relatively good economic situation, with the largest shares of people saying they can afford expensive durables.

Based on the findings presented in both parts of this blog post, debts are approximately twice as common in Georgia as being owed money. Yet, the largest share of the population of the country are those who report neither having debts, nor being owed money.

To look at these issues in more detail, explore the Caucasus Barometer data at CRRC’s Online Data Analysis platform.

Debts and Loans in Georgia (Part 1)

In Georgia, where, according to the World Bank, a third of the population live on under USD 2.5 per day, poverty and unemployment are consistently considered the most important issues facing the country. For those who are struggling financially, borrowing is a widespread coping mechanism. While access to credit can have benefits, debt can also have psychological costs, such as increased stress and anxiety. CRRC’s 2015 Caucasus Barometer (CB) data show interesting patterns about having personal debts in Georgia. The first part of this blog post focuses on the characteristics of those who report having personal debts in Georgia, while the second part looks at the money lending patterns, as well as reported well-being of people who are owed money or who borrow it.

In response to the question, “Do you currently have any personal debts?” which asks about all types of debt a person may have, 46% of the population report having debts and 53% say they do not have any. There are no large differences by settlement type. People between 36 and 55 years of age report having debts more frequently than people in other age groups. Men report they have debts slightly more often than women.

Note: The charts in this blog post do not include answer options “Don’t know” and “Refuse to answer,” which constituted 1% of responses.

People reporting a more difficult economic situation in their household are more likely to say they have debts. While 55% of people who state they do not have enough money for food report having debts, 28% of people who have enough money for durables report the same.

Note: Answer options “We can afford to buy some expensive durables like a refrigerator or washing machine” and “We can afford to buy anything we need” were combined into the category “Can afford to buy expensive durables” on the chart above.

In the second part of this blog post, which will be published on Monday, patterns of both borrowing and lending money will be discussed.

To have a closer look at the Caucasus Barometer data, visit CRRC’s Online Data Analysis platform.

Rising expectations: People report more positive expectations about MPs immediately after elections

Research suggests that voters not only become more knowledgeable about political issues, but also more politically engaged during electoral campaigns. CRRC/NDI survey data also suggest that during the periods immediately following elections, there are more positive expectations about elected officials. These, however, do not last long after elections.

A citizen’s knowledge of which Member of Parliament (MP) represents her or him ebbs and flows with election cycles in Georgia. In March 2016, three and a half years after the most recent parliamentary elections in October 2012, only 31% of the population of Georgia answered correctly who their majoritarian member of parliament was at the time. A month after the October 2016 parliamentary elections, in November 2016, the respective share nearly doubled (57%). The findings before and after the 2012 parliamentary elections are similar. In the period between the elections, knowledge of which MP represented a constituent declined.

People’s expectations of their MPs also oscillate with the electoral cycle, with higher expectations immediately after elections. After both the October 2012 and October 2016 elections, the share of those reporting that MPs will serve people’s interests increased almost two-fold compared to early spring of the election year. Expectations that MPs will serve only their own interests have a tendency to decrease immediately after elections. However, they gradually increase later on. The expectations that MPs will do what their political party will tell them to also decrease immediately after the elections, although the gaps are smaller.

Note: In the survey waves from February 2012 through April 2014, the question was asked about majoritarian members of parliament. Since April 2015, the question was asked about members of parliament in general.

Positive expectations also increased after the October 2016 elections in respect to whether the newly elected MPs will take into account the opinions of regular people – “people like you,” as it was worded in the questionnaire. On the November 2016 survey, 63% either completely or somewhat agreed with this opinion, while the respective share was only 28% in March 2016, when the same question was asked about the MPs that were in office at the time.

This evidence suggests that people in Georgia become more optimistic about members of parliament in the months immediately following elections, believing that elected politicians will serve people’s interests. However, as time passes, they become disillusioned and their expectations become more skeptical.

To explore the CRRC/NDI survey findings, visit CRRC’s Online Data Analysis portal.