CRRC, ARISC and American Councils are pleased to announce the 13th session of the Spring/Summer 2025 Tbilisi Works-in-Progress series!
This week’s session will be in hybrid format in-person at the CRRC Georgia office and online.
“Fault Lines and Flashpoints: Public Opinion in Georgia After the 2024 Elections”
Jesse Driscoll, University of California San Diego
Wednesday, June 25, 2025 at 18:30 Tbilisi time (10:30 EST)
Which aspects of Georgian Dream’s campaign appeal were most effective in the fall of 2024? As of this writing, the results of Georgia’s Fall 2024 Parliamentary elections are disputed. Many Georgians are also reluctant to answer politically sensitive survey questions, likely due to both social desirability bias and fear of surveillance. This project, conducted together with Julie George and Dan Maliniak, leverages survey experiments to overcome these inferential confounds. Caveats and context-specific rationalizations of the findings are discussed, with an analytic focus on (a) overall polarization (b) interactive age cohort effects (c) the Ukraine war, and (d) “sour grapes” as structural drivers of support for Georgia’s gradual anti-Western drift.
Jesse Driscoll is a professor of political science and serves as chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the school. He is an area specialist in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Russian-speaking world. Driscoll’s first book, Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States, (Cambridge University Press, 2015) maps the processes by which well-functioning domestic hierarchies emerged after relatively short periods of anarchic violence in Georgia and Tajikistan. His second book, Doing Global Fieldwork: A Social Scientist’s Guide to Mixed-Methods Research Far From Home (Columbia University Press, 2021) is a practitioner’s guide to assist in collecting original data. His third book, joint work with Dominique Arel, is Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
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Works-in-Progress is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the CRRC office at Chavchavadze Ave. 5 and online. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) Georgia, the American Councils for International Education, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC). All of the talks are free and open to the public.
In observation of the spirit of the Chatham House Rule, the talks will not be recorded, and we courteously request that the other participants refrain from recording and/or distributing recordings as well or citing anything expressed therein in the press without explicit permission. The opinions expressed in WiP talks are those of the speakers alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CRRC, ARISC or of American Councils.