Love of Country, Not of Leaders

The FINANCIAL — If you’ve flown to Tbilisi in the past few years, you may notice you drove into town on George W Bush Highway.

The FINANCIAL — If you’ve flown to Tbilisi in the past few years, you may notice you drove into town on George W Bush Highway.

If you had visited before, you may notice a growing lack of Russian street signs.  Georgians, as well as the Georgian government, have long nurtured a great affinity for the west.  Due to decades of tense conflict, an even stronger aversion to Russia has developed.  International relationships are represented clearly in the Georgian public’s attitudes toward a country’s leadership, but politics seem to have a somewhat different effect on Georgians’ attitudes toward the countries themselves.

Approximately once a quarter, Georgian Opinion Research Business International conducts an omnibus survey of 1000 Georgians. The most recent wave, completed last month (August 2012), included general opinion questions on a variety of countries and world leaders.  We asked about 12 countries from Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucuses, and elsewhere, as well as 6 Presidents. Each respondent was asked their “overall opinion” of each country, and given the options, “positive, negative, or neutral.” 
In order to discuss the results more concisely, I have created an index by subtracting the percentage of negative responses from the positive. 

For Country — There is a noticeable trend in Georgia’s opinion of countries: the four highest rated countries are EU members.  As support for the phrase “close borders spark tensions,” four of the five lowest rated countries are Georgia’s nearest neighbors.

Russia’s rating was the lowest, but was not terribly negative.  In fact, it was nearly perfectly neutral, receiving a -1 index score.  Furthermore, 24% of respondents expressed neutrality, and those with strong feelings were nearly perfectly balanced.  It seems that when the public becomes less enamored with a country, it’s represented by a shift more toward ambivalence than hatred.  You’ll notice that as the opinion index drops, neutral responses rise in nearly perfect correlation.

For the President — There is, just as you might expect, a pretty strong correlation between a country’s rating and its leader’s.  Respondents were asked how much they “personally favored” each of 6 presidents on a four-point scale, given no neutral option.  Vladimir Putin, to no one’s surprise, is quite reviled by Georgians.  70% said they did not like him at all, and another 10% said not much.  By comparison, Ahmadinejad, the only other president with a negative index, received no favor from only 27% of respondents and “not very much” from another 17%.

However, it seems that Georgians don’t let negative opinions of a leader completely bury their view on the country itself.   The greatest disparity of opinion between leader and country is Russia itself, with Ukraine being a close second.  Putin’s -72 index score is a stark difference from the attitude toward Russia in general, and while Georgians don’t really find Yanukovych appealing (11), they simply love Ukraine (72). It seems that, to a point, Georgians feel a connection to ex-compatriots in spite of the actions of their respective governments.

It may even be true that, regardless of political past, Georgians do not appreciate the leadership of any country as much as the country itself:  every leader received a lower rating than their country.  This consistent gap could, however, be attributable to a lack of a neutral option when rating each leader; perhaps many of the people who gave “not very much” favor to a leader would have preferred a neutral option. 

In light of this question and its usefulness in discussing Georgian political attitudes, GORBI will adjust some of the response options for these questions in future waves.  Hopefully then we will be able to use this data more confidently when discussing the relationship between countries and governments in the minds of Georgians.

Polls of this kind have a margin of error of around 3%, with 95% confidence.