The FINANCIAL — Georgians have gained a fair bit of confidence in their new Prime Minister, and the sentiment continues to grow. Over the past few months, the public’s confidence rating for Bidzina Ivanishvili has grown closer and closer to President Saakashvili’snumbers at the beginning of his political career.
Misha, on the other hand, has been demoted to some of the lowest approval ratings elected officials can maintain without fearing pitchforks and torches. Let’s not be too quick to declare the next King David, though; these things have a way of moderating.
Georgian Opinion Research Business International has been running our regular omnibus survey over the last few years, and we’ve been collecting some interesting trend data. We’ve been asking approval ratings, confidence in a wide variety of institutions, and happiness with political actions. This week I’ll compare our most recent confidence ratings to some older trend data.
Misha’s Cruise — It’s quite normal to see a jump in public support the moment a candidate wins an election. You can find supportingexamples throughout the history of opinion polling, including thecaseof Saakashvili himself; people love to get behind a winner. Coming to office on the patriotic winds of revolution, Misha started his presidential career with very high numbers.
GORBI’s first poll after the Rose Revolution showed that around three quarters of Georgians expressed confidence in then-newcomer Saakashvili. He rode these high numbers only a short while though, until he experienced what nearly every politician has experienced: his confidence rating dropped quickly around year two and didn’t much change after that.
While the drop is quite drastic, a 49 point rating is modern politics’ cruising altitude. Aside from the Kennedys and wartime Churchills of the world, most politicians can realistically expect to stay just above – or just below – 50% public confidence. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.
The New Guy — Bidzina’s political start looks a bit different.It seems Georgians were not all that certain what they thought of Bidzina just after the elections. As they’ve seen more of the newPrime Minister’s face,though, Georgians have begun their belated honeymoon; he jumped from 53% confidence in November to 66% this month.
One possible explanation for this delayed bump is simply Bidzina’s decades of reclusiveness; voters couldn’t have confidence in a man they didn’t know. He didn’t participate in a revolution or spend decades in law or politics. I think a more interestingexplanation comes from voting behavior ina “one-man show” government.
Most people, and indeed the leaders themselves, think of these two men not as separate arms of the government but rather two singular leaders fighting to run the whole government. We’re still living in a country where legality and reality are not quite the same thing,so Bidzina and Misha really are two possible responses to the same question. Only 9% of our respondents expressed confidence in both men, the rest chose one or the other.
Because of this horse race mentality, a rise in Bidzina’s confidence ratings may be driven by the drop in Misha’s reputation. If this is true, you caneven make the argument that Georgia didn’t elect Bidzina into office, but rather they voted Misha out.
Whether Ivanishvili’s ratings drop to cruising altitude through the rest of his career, which he still insists will end in another year,we at GORBI will continue to poll regularly. All statistics in this article have margins of error of around 3.5% with 95% confidence. Visit our website at gorbi.com for more articles.
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