American Councils, CRRC and ARISC present the 2nd talk in the Fall 2014 Works-in-Progress Series!

Aaron Erlich, University of Washington
"Polling for Democracy in Kaspi: An Experiment on Quantitative Information and Citizen Behavior"

Wednesday, September 24, 2014 at 6:30pm
EPF/CRRC-Georgia, Kavsadze St. 3, Tbilisi

In recent elections, the presentation of quantitative information in Georgia has been highly polarized. Such scandal is prevalent across democracies, particularly in developing countries. This talk introduces my larger project on the politics of quantitative public opinion data in developing democracies. Using the example of the 2014 Kaspi municipal elections, I will discuss many of the issues with using polls as prediction of election outcomes. I will then discuss a new method I have developed for quantifying uncertainty among an electorate, discuss some of its benefits, and present preliminary results from an experiment on whether monetary incentivization matters for this method.

Aaron Erlich, a former CRRC employee, has worked in various areas of survey design and analysis in a wide variety of countries in Africa and the Former Soviet Union. He is a founding member of www.poldevsvy.org , a listserv and network of scholars innovating in surveys in developing countries. Aaron is a current IREX fellow and is completing his dissertation in Political Science at the University of Washington.

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W-i-P is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the Eurasian Partnership Foundation at Kavsadze St. 3. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC), the American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC). All of the talks are free and open to the public.

The purpose of the W-i-P series is to provide support and productive criticism to those researching and developing academic projects pertaining the Caucasus region.

Would you like to present at one of the W-i-P sessions? Send an e-mail to natia@crrccenters.org.