• 2017-04-10
It's an interesting thing, what the attitude of the population towards the country's politics is in current political situation. If it's any different towards the President and other political figures and how it has changed compared to previous years.
 
IPM conducted a research to determine this. Georgians over the age of 16 were selected by random selection method and surveyed. The size of the sample was 1200 people.
 
Respondents were asked to separately assess trust in the President and generally in politicians. Analyzing answers to these questions we used two indexes that reflect the population's evaluation of the activities of the President and the political spectrum. Minimum value of the index is 0 (fully negative rate) and maximum rate is 100 (fully positive rate).
 
The study revealed following index values: the President's performance evaluation index is 56, the political spectrum's performance evaluation index is 30. Neither index value is high, but it is noteworthy that the President's activities are assessed far more positively by the population.
 
Now let's compare the change of these two indexes in recent years. For this purpose we used the results of similar studies conducted in previous years.
 

Chart 1. Satisfaction Trend of the Political Spectrum's and the President's Activities

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As you can see from the chart the President's performance evaluation index has been growing from year to year while the Political Leaders performance evaluation value has, on the contrary been decreasing and has only increased after the last survey. The interesting fact is that in 2013 and 2014 the Political Leaders activities were being assessed far more positively that the President's (esp. in 2013 when Mikheil Saakashvili was the President), while in the last two years the attitude towards the President has been far more positive than towards other government leaders. It should also be noted that in a certain period of Mikheil Saakashvili's presidency his performance evaluation index was reaching 80, which is a very high rate. This kind of total satisfaction has not been observed during Margvelashvili’s presidency.
Based on the results of this study we can conclude that the population assesses President Margvelashvili's activities far more positively than other politicians. At the same time in both cases the index value is low, however in the President's case it has tendency to grow.