Authors
Dennis Redeker, Sebastian Kuhnke and Giorgi Davidian
The Georgian parliamentary elections of 26 October 2024 brought about a political and constitutional crisis. The incumbent government led by the Georgian Dream party under billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili attained a slight absolute majority in an election. Various actors, including the European Parliament, the United States and the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) called into question the fairness of these elections.
Currently, the Parliament of Georgia is effectively a one-party body, as the opposition parties, who passed the five-percent election threshold, renounced their parliamentary mandates. The October 2024 elections intensified polarization in Georgia and contributed to the societal divisions along political lines, peaking in late November, when Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze declared a delay in EU accession talks until 2028. This announcement sparked large-scale protests, which are still ongoing. One of the main demands of the protesters is new parliamentary elections and freeing prisoners of conscience.
This wave of protests was not the only one, which has cast doubt on Georgia’s Western trajectory and which led to thousands of people taking the streets in 2024. Tbilisi and other cities were also “shaken” by mass protests that were triggered by the reintroduction and the passage of the “foreign agents bill.” All this significantly undermined the trust that Georgians invested in the Georgian Dream.
Trust matters in democracies. Research on public opinion in Georgia is conducted by a number of reliable institutions, including the National Democratic Institute, the Caucasus Research Resource Center and the International Republican Institute. Adding to these efforts, at the University of Bremen’s Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI), we conducted online surveys of the Georgian population starting in 2022. When we analyzed a survey conducted among Georgians in the week before the 2024 elections (n=1,017), and compared the data to what we observed in December 2023 (n=1,091), we saw a striking shift in the public’s trust in a number of key political institutions.
A New Dataset to Study Compare Trust in Public Institutions Over Time
Before we discuss these changes, we first describe the process of data collection to demonstrate the quality of the samples, as well as how we processed the data. In a project funded by the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg, we conducted a quota-sampled online survey of more than 1,000 respondents, aged 18 and above, across Georgia in December 2023 and October 2024. We conducted the latter survey in the week before the elections. We recruited participants through advertisements on Meta’s social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. The questionnaire entailed measures on trust in a variety of institutions and actors, both Georgian and international. Respondents were asked “how much trust do you have in the following institutions (and countries)?” and were tasked to rate trust levels on a 10-point scale, where 1 stands for “no trust at all” and 10 indicates “very high trust”. Nineteen items have been included in both years, ranging from trust in the Georgian Orthodox Church to the World Bank. For each year, we calculated the weighted average for each of the nineteen variables.
The quota sampling we applied resulted in two datasets similar yet ultimately somewhat different from the characteristics of the population of Georgia. In order to attain a greater degree of representativeness of each and also to allow for comparison, we engaged in a so-called “post-stratification approach“ in which we used external data on age, gender and – for the 2024 dataset – regional distribution of population to weigh the data. This ensures, for instance, that oversampled respondents from urban areas do not distort the results.
Major Shifts in Popular Trust in Public Institutions
Figure 1 shows the change between December 2023 and October 2024 in terms of trust in nineteen institutions and actors. The arrow illustrates the direction in which average trust levels changed and the degree of the change. The most dramatic shifts can be seen for the Georgian government, parliament, courts and Orthodox Church; respondents had significantly less trust in these institutions in the week before the elections than they had ten months prior. Other (albeit less) strong changes include lower trust in Georgian academics and more trust in Japan. The latter has been included as one of the largest economies and a major provider of development aid globally. Otherwise, only NGOs and Ukraine recorded notable gains.
Actors such as the European Union, the US or NATO showed only a marginal decrease. The increase in trust in the Georgian Constitution or the World Bank was similarly marginal. These developments are also insignificant insofar as these actors continue to have some of the highest levels of trust.
Respondents continued to show the lowest level of trust in Russia and China, which continued to decline, with almost no trust being placed in Russia in particular.
It can be concluded that Western actors were trusted significantly more. Questions on the “President of Georgia” and “opposition parties” were only included in 2024. Both scored in the midfield, at 4,96 points and 4,35 points respectively, higher than the government but also below the scale’s midpoint of 5.5.
Figure 1: Average trust in nineteen actors and institutions compared over time (December 2023-October 2024); red arrows indicate a decrease in trust between 2023 and 2024, whereas blue arrows indicate an increase in trust.
The data presented here is generally similar to data produced by pollsters, albeit question phrasing limits direct comparability. For instance, the September/October 2023 representative poll by the International Republican Institute shows that 38 percent of Georgians held a positive view of Georgian Parliament, while 40 percent held a positive view of Georgian courts. In our December 2023 poll, 41 percent of respondents indicated an above-average level of trust in their parliament, while 47 percent indicated an above-average level of trust in the courts.
Our data, collected during two crucial periods in Georgia’s recent political history, shows a major shift in popular trust. Institutions associated with the government were less trusted in the run-up to the 2024 elections than they were in December 2023, when the Georgian Dream government just celebrated the next step toward EU Membership, represented by the official granting of candidate status.
It can be assumed that the elections and the subsequent political strife have further impacted trust in the government, and also possibly in opposition forces. With international organizations and Western partners still very trusted by the population, the government’s orientation toward Russia in particular may be a losing strategy.
