Like many of you, I have visited Gezi Park over the last few days. While walking around, I noticed that a lot of the protesters are young and they seem new to the business of protesting. They had strongly held views on a lot of topics but are not overtly political. My observation is about […]
There are lots of things about Facebook that annoy me (mostly how it went from being a useful way to find out what your coolest friends were doing, listening to or reading to becoming an echo chamber of your most annoying friends’ scores on idiotic quizzes, but that’s a different blog post on a different […]
Paul Goble, over at Window On Eurasia, found a guide to civic activism in Russia on Live Journal (Russia’s main blog platform) from a blogger called Noblesse Oblige. Noblesse Oblige has come up with several principles for “Civic Activists in Russia who Don’t Want to Get Beat in the Head.” Paul has translated and I’ve […]
As the 2008 Presidential election in Azerbaijan approaches, I predict there will be a substantial amount of revisionism of what happened in the 2005 election. It’s not hard to do — so few people pay attention that it’s easy for regime mouthpieces to say whatever they want without anyone challenging them — and there’s plenty […]
One of my favorite Eurasia sites, Window on Eurasia, has an excellent post on the impact events of January 20, 1990 in Azerbaijan had on the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. With the Soviet system on life support, Gorbachev sent the army in to quash popular protests in Baku. Scores of people who had […]
There comes a time when election protesters need to sit down and shut up. In Georgia, that time has come. Let’s look at the data: A credible, pre-election poll shows the president at 46% among the likeliest voters, with projected support at 52%; An exit poll that put the president’s support at 54% [though with […]
There’s been a spate of pre-election polls from Georgia lately, most of them not worth the paper they’re written on. All have been released by various interests to demonstrate their electoral strength and have little to no basis in reality. The only consequence of their release has been to increase public skepticism of polls. President […]
Two excellent examples in the news (more or less) this week about conducting polls in unstable countries. (Tomorrow, the latest poll from Georgia). The first was a snippet in an interesting Slate article by Alex Halperin called What’s Going on In Kenya? Unfortunately, one bit of data has not surfaced. The International Republican Institute, a […]
Simple question, complex answer. The Caucasus Research Resources Center, with whom I met on my recent trip to Georgia, starts to get to the heart of the matter in this very good post on how to evaluate pre-election polls. To boil Hans’ argument down, the burden on is on the pollster to publicly disclose as […]
Did you like Russia’s election? Get used to that model because many of the same strategies and tactics will be used by Azerbaijan’s ruling party (YAP) in the October 2008 Presidential election. I doubt, however, that Ilham Aliyev will be satisfied with Unified Russia’s 64%. Radio Free Europe wrote about five myths about the Russian […]
