The Misha You Know, The Bidzina You Don’t

The FINANCIAL — Early next month, Georgia will hold a very important round of Parliamentary elections.  There is a new political party, “Georgian Dream,” hoping to secure seats.

Then there is, of course, the United National Movement hoping to maintain its majority standing.  Both parties have figureheads who have tried to shape the electorate’s minds with their policies and personalities.

Today we’re going to take a look at what the Georgian public thinks of each man, Mikheil Saakashvili and Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Georgian Opinion Research Business International conducted its most recent quarterly survey in August.  We polled 1000 Georgians nationwide on a variety of topics, some of which dealt with politics.  Each respondent was given a list of statements used to “assess politicians,” then were asked about each regarding both Saakashvili and Ivanishvili.  Each politician was assessed separately, and respondents were asked for each trait to choose “corresponds,” “does not correspond,” or “no answer.” 

Each “corresponds” statistic given, unless stated otherwise, excludes non-responses.

Results — Bidzina was more likely to be called moral, honest, compassionate, and to be said to “do a good job.”   Misha was more likely to be called corrupt, an expert, a strong manager, and a liar.  Ivanishvili was seen as more likely by far to implement the interests of Russia, and Saakashvili was much more likely to be called unstable. Respondents were just as likely to call Misha smart as Bidzina.  In general, the results suggest that Georgians prefer Ivanishvili’s personality.  However, we’ll discuss some uncertainties that cast doubt on these simple numbers. 

There were variations by age group, but they were inconsistent and had few discernable trends.  The most consistent demographic variation was found between men and women. If we divide the characteristics into “good” and “bad” traits, women find Saakashvili universally more appealing: Misha wins in every single category.  However, women also more frequently chose “no answer (33% average)” than men (30% average).  As we will now discuss, this could have biased the final results.

Only New Mud Slung — The most important difference to discuss is one of information; respondents were far more likely to give “no answer” when discussing every aspect of Ivanishvili.  This is almost certainly due to the dichotomy between the two public images: one man has been the most prominent figure in Georgia for some eight years, and the other shunned most publicity before expressing political ambitions last year.  The average number of people to choose “no answer” for each of Saakashvili’s assessments was 24%, while Ivanishvili had an average of 40%. 

The result is that, while Misha has been acting as a functioning president for this long, nearly all public information on Bidzina has come from campaigns: Saakashvili’s ridicule and his own party’s attempts at boasting.  This fact seems somewhat reflected in these responses.  Certainly, Saakashvili’s promotion of Ivanishvili as a Russian stooge has gained some footing, even if 50% of those asked were not willing to make a decision about it.

The other noticeable trend in non-response was between types of assessments.  Respondents seemed hesitant to offer their opinions on things that are logically harder to know, and more willing to comment on broad topics or personality traits.  In dealing with both candidates, nonresponse was relatively more common for assessments like “honest,” “corrupt,” and “liar,” and less common for “smart,” “does a good job,” “compassionate,” and “expert.”

Because this data was collected two months before the election, and because this is neither my area of expertise or interest, neither GORBI nor I make any claims to predicting the elections.  The only thing we can comfortably say is that politics in Georgia seeks to be the same as in every democracy: being a new candidate means the electorate knows less about you, both good and bad.

Polls of this kind have a margin of error of around 3% with 95% confidence. Negative values are an artifact of automatic calculation techniques and imply nothing.