Policy Think Tanks | A Skeptical Assessment
- left Azerbaijan to pursue further education and career opportunities in European or North American destination, while staying in the research field; or
- migrated to the private sector to large multinational companies in Azerbaijan, with the goal of attaining geographic mobility and potentially expatriate status in the mid-term.
The old guard are generally those who received training during the Soviet era. This group can maintain some distance from the government; however, the risk being self-absorbed and may well be spoiled by an overabundance of funding that often has accepted shallow and low-quality outputs. Generally, therefore, the old guard see very limited use in updating their skill sets, since they remain comfortable doing what they have always done.
- Azerbaijani universities (maybe with the exception of Khazar) are not incubating the skills necessary for the younger generation to carry out policy analysis. There are competent lecturers, but they are exception. Curricula remain outdated; while many students want to learn, they have little formal opportunity to do so. There are many brilliant young people (as seen in the lively discussions on the Azerbaijani Studies Group), but they are largely self-taught.
- The private sector in Azerbaijan, dominated by an inner circle close to key families, does not demand high quality research. Business grows through oligarchic capture, not by a detailed orientation toward customers. Thus, there exists little independent market research (though there are some organizations with potential for reform such as SIAR and ERA) that could form the nucleus for quantitative, evidence-based approaches to policy research.
- The Azerbaijani government does not encourage independent analysis. It does not release important data publicly and at times actively discourages independent analysis.
A policy vacuum is therefore expanding in the country, which has no capacity to reflect systematically on its own challenges, and therefore no ability to articulate constructive solutions. The vacuum is well illustrated by hard numbers: last year one international organization offering stipends received 25 highly competitive applications to a scholarship program in Armenia, 14 in Georgia (where a lot of the potential talent is busy in government), but merely four competitive applications in Azerbaijan. On a more substantial level, Azerbaijan's bad public policy is visible everywhere and the country can no longer ignore its fundamental problems by palliative spending.
The development of Azerbaijani think tanks and their role in public policy discourse
By Zaur Shiriyev
Think Tanks in Armenia: Who Needs their Thinking?
By Yevgenya Jenny Paturyan
Think tanks are considered to be an important part of civil society: providers and keepers of expertise on important social, economic, environmental, political and other issues. Organizations like Chatham House and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace come to mind. In addition to ‘pure’ think tanks, there is a plethora of organizations that combine research with advocacy and action, Transparency International being a prominent example.
The lay of the land: An interview with Hans Gutbrod on think tanks in the South Caucasus
[Editor's note: This is the second in a series of blog posts co-published with On Think Tanks. The views expressed within this blog series are the authors alone, and do not represent the views of CRRC-Georgia.]Interview by Dustin Gilbreath
Thinking about think tanks in the South Caucasus
By: Dustin Gilbreath
Attitudes reported by Georgian parents and the qualities they find important for children to learn
The CRRC’s 500th post and thoughts about the future of social research
How to buy votes when you can’t buy votes
Today, less than democratic regimes face a serious dilemma – how do you buy votes to win an election without becoming an international pariah. Unfortunately for a society and fortunately for an autocrat, the wheels of power and administrative resources an incumbent regime wields provide ample opportunity to manipulate electoral outcomes through what are otherwise legitimate activities related to state spending and coercion.Knowledge of Russian in Azerbaijan
Paternalism in Georgia
Finding a good job in Georgia
Are more educated women in Georgia choosing not to have children?
Do Think Tanks in Georgia Lobby for Foreign Powers?
By Till Bruckner
Common challenges, common solutions
By Dustin Gilbreath
Nine things politicians should know about Georgian voters
Making energy matters matter: entering the electoral field
2015 EU survey report: Major trends and recommendations
Third Stage of the Junior Research Fellowship Program at CRRC-Azerbaijan Launched!
Material Deprivation in the South Caucasus
Georgia's desire for NATO membership
Research on Education of IDP Children in Georgia
Language Learning in Georgia
Winners of the First Stage of the Junior Research Fellowship Program-Azerbaijan Announced
Survey of PhD Students in Georgia
PISA 2009 | Results for Azerbaijan
PISA in Azerbaijan | Take 2 | great maths scores
Georgian Election | ODIHR Preliminary Report and its Percentages
Caucasus Data | Language: Russian versus English?
Focus on non-oil tax policy as oil revenues predicted to decline
PISA Test | how are Azerbaijani schools doing?
OECD has just published their 2006 PISA results, which stands for "Program for International Student Assessment". In PISA, 15-year olds are tested for basic abilities in various fields. The 2006 round focused primarily on science learning. A little more than 60 countries participated, including Azerbaijan. Georgia and Armenia did not take part.Caucasus Election Programs in the 1990s
History vs Public Policy
Snapshots on Attitudes towards Education
Higher Education and Employment -- a broken link
International Survey of Think Tanks | Zilch in the Caucasus
The Foreign Policy Research Institute does an international survey of think tanks. Apparently they mailed 3,025 surveys to 126 countries. Of these, 817 responded in 96 countries.Private tutoring and inequality in Georgia
According to the March 2016 CRRC/TI-Georgia survey, roughly 4 in 10 households with school-aged children reported hiring a private tutor at the time of the survey for at least one subject that a child in their household was studying at school. While, as has been noted before, private tutoring reflects economic inequalities in Georgian society, it also contributes to furthering these inequalities. This blog post looks at how the frequency of hiring private tutors in Georgia differs by settlement type and level of education of the interviewed household member.Taking partly free voters seriously: autocratic response to voter preferences in Armenia and Georgia
Do voters in less than democratic contexts matter or are elections simply facades used to create a veneer of democratic accountability for domestic and international actors? Within the Autocratic Response to Voter Preferences in Armenia and Georgia project, funded by Academic Swiss Caucasus Net, CRRC-Georgia and CRRC-Armenia aimed to help answer this question, at least for Georgia and Armenia. On October 27, Caucasus Survey published the results of the project in a special issue, available here.Who in Georgia wants to study abroad?
Studying abroad can offer students the opportunity to learn new languages, travel, experience different cultures, and form relationships in addition to studying. The Knowledge of and Attitudes towards the European Union survey (EU Survey) implemented by CRRC-Georgia for Europe Foundation provides information about what share of the population in Georgia would like to go abroad to study, and the demographic characteristics of those who would like to.Willingness to temporarily emigrate from Armenia and Georgia: Does education matter?
A previous CRRC blog post showed how people’s willingness to temporarily emigrate from Armenia and Georgia varied according to their belief in whether everything in life is determined by fate or people shape their fate themselves. The blog post concluded that compared to people who are not interested in temporary emigration from these countries, those who are tended to believe slightly more often that people shape their fate themselves.Pension reform is underway in Georgia, but only about half of the population is aware of it
On July 21, 2018 Georgian legislators approved an accumulative pension scheme, after years of discussion. As one of the requirements of the new law, employees with contracts who are under the age of 40 have to contribute 2% of their remuneration to the state-run pension fund, on a monthly basis. Although other employees are not legally required to do so, they may participate in the scheme voluntarily. This law is a first step in a larger reform of Georgia’s pension system. Opposition politicians have criticized the new law citing that it counters the country’s constitution as it introduces a new tax without a referendum. Several civil society groups also expressed criticism of the reform, questioning its legitimacy.Choosing a profession: who should decide young people’s career paths?
Choosing a career path is one of the most important decisions that people make in their life. For some, it might be a complicated and anxiety-riddled experience. One reason is that the process of choosing a career begins at a young age when a person may not have thought about what they want to do with their lives. For this, among many other reasons, parents often play a role in deciding what their children study at university, which is often though not always associated with their profession. However, there are a number of arguments about why it is better to allow a child to choose their own career paths. Based on the CRRC/NDI June 2018 survey, this blog post describes the adult population of Georgia’s views about whether parents or their children should choose their career, and describes how opinions differ by a number of demographic characteristics.Pessimism about Georgia’s direction hides room for optimism
While a large number of Georgians think the country is going in the wrong direction, the fact that they are judging the country’s performance based on issues rather than political partisanship alone is a good sign.Georgia’s Foreign Policy Trilemma: Balance, Bandwagon, or Hedge? Part 1
Georgia is a small, partly free democracy in a tough neighbourhood, and NATO membership remains an unfulfilled promise. While Russia is widely perceived as the main threat to Georgia’s security, the appropriate strategic or political response to the threat is not obvious. What options does Georgia have when faced with a powerful rival on its border, and what public support is there for these options?Georgia’s Foreign Policy Trilemma: Balance, Bandwagon, or Hedge? Part 2
The first part of this blog post discussed evidence of an association between perceiving Russia as the main threat to Georgia and a preference for a foreign policy that balances against that threat through alliances with the West. The relationship between threat perception and hedging, defined as attempting to maintain good relations with both Russia and the West, is less clear.The economic and educational consequences of child marriage in Georgia
Widely condemned as a violation of human rights, child marriage is associated with negative health outcomes — both physical and psychological. Aside from these clear issues, a growing body of research suggests child marriage also has economic consequences for both the women who marry under the age of 18 and society at large.Grit in Georgia
Grit, the idea that passion and perseverance are important determinants of success aside from intelligence, has gained widespread attention in recent years. This stems from the fact that grit is a strong predictor of a number of outcomes like employment and income in life. Previous analysis on this blog suggests that the grit scale is also a strong predictor of employment in Georgia among young people in a select number of rural areas. Whether this works on a nationally representative sample is however an open question. So too is the question what predicts grit in Georgia. This blog uses data from CRRC Georgia’s January 2020 omnibus survey to address these questions.Covid-19 Monitor: New Report on Georgian Public Opinion on the Covid-19 Crisis
Georgian parents are concerned about online learning
Georgia has postponed the reopening of schools in major cities due to a new surge in the pandemic, but what are the biggest concerns Georgians have with the education system?
Georgia’s new academic year started on 15 September, but physical attendance at schools and universities in major cities has been postponed until 1 October.
Georgian parents are concerned about online learning
Talk about political polarisation in Georgia is easy to find. Some have suggested that the recent United National Movement (UNM) announcement that Saakashvili will be their prime ministerial candidate will only make matters worse.
A new data analysis CRRC Georgia released on Tuesday suggests that this may in fact be the case. Data from several years of CRRC Georgia and NDI polling indicates that there are few ideological or policy issues that the supporters of Georgian Dream (GD) and the United National Movement (UNM) disagree about. Rather, attitudes towards politicians and political events are what divides, a fact the public intuitively recognises.