CC BY
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Rauf GARAGOZOV
Ph.D. (Psychol.), Leading Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies of the Caucasus
(Baku, Azerbaijan).
Rena KADYROVA
D.Sc. (Psychol.), Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, Baku State University
(Baku, Azerbaijan).
TRUST AND DEMOCRACY IN THE CENTRAL CAUCASUS: DIFFERENT TRAJECTORIES, DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS1
Abstract
The author takes the problem of trust as one of the pivotal issues of democratic development in the Central Caucasian countries as his main subject. He identifies three types of trust: “political,” “general,” and “private,” with the latter type predominating in the Central Caucasus. He is out to prove that while pri-
vate (interpersonal) trust (trust among members of the immediate and extended family and among friends and acquaintances) is still the most widespread in the Central Caucasus, contemporary society needs a shift from private trust to a wider trust in other people and trust in the state as an unbiased and legitimate structure.
1 The article is based on a paper delivered at the symposium “Democratic Structures, Democratic Culture: The Republic of Georgia in Comparative Perspective,” Washington University, St. Louis (U.S.), 12-13 November, 2009.
The findings of a cross-cultural study carried out by a mixed group of academics from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Great Britain, Spain, Greece, and the
Netherlands convinced the author that the Central Caucasian states need modern state institutions to raise their citizens’ trust in them.
I n L i e u o f I n t r o d u c t i o n
The article presents some of the results obtained in the course of a project2 designed to identify the level of trust of young people in the local and central political institutions and leaders and to model the relations among the identification patterns, the levels of political trust, and the perceptions of its various aspects.
The cross-cultural study covered Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, and the U.K.; the sampling of 3,009 respondents consisted of boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 18 who belonged to the ethnic majorities and some of the ethnic minorities in the countries listed above.3
Trust in Democracy
A respected international organization assessed the Central Caucasian countries as follows: “Most important is that although democratic forms are in place in the region, the substance of democracy—including a political culture based on trust and healthy levels of political participation—is absent.”4
The above, which ties together democracy and trust, raises certain questions; this calls for closer scrutiny. Three of them can be described as the most important: How do trust and democracy correlate? What does trust actually mean? In what ways is trust developing in the region? Let’s start at the beginning.
Academic writings point to an interconnection between trust and democracy; it is frequently pointed out that the level of trust is one of the most important indications of society’s democratic nature. One of the researchers has offered the following: “People need to trust both public institutions and other people in order to be willing to participate in politics.”5
Meanwhile, there is no agreement about how to interpret trust; it has any number of definitions. Some academics insist that trust means unquestioned acceptance of official statements; others say it is
2 The reference is to the Political Trust and Political Participation amongst Young People from Ethnic Minorities in the NIS and EU: A Social Psychological Investigation project. The empirical research upon which this paper is based was supported by a grant received from INTAS (Grant No. 03-51-3123), which was awarded to the University of Surrey, the International Center for Social Research, the Georgian Academy of Sciences Institute of Psychology, the Orthodox St. Ti-chon Theological Institute, The Kharkov National University, The University of the Basque Country, the University of Utrecht, the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences and the Smolensk Humanitarian University in 20042007. We are greatly indebted to our colleagues who contributed to the design of this research: Evanthia Lyons, Giorgi Kipiani, Tatiana Riazanova, Valentina Pavlenko, Jose Valencia, Maykel Verkuyten, Xenia Chryssochoou, and Vladmir Slivanov.
3 I refer to the following ethnic minorities: the Lezghians and Talyshins (Azerbaijan); Armenians (Georgia); Georgians and Ukrainians (Russia); Russians and Crimean Tatars (Ukraine); Surinamers, Turks and Moroccans (the Netherlands); Arabs and Gypsies (Spain); young people from the emigrant communities of Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, African countries, and countries of the Caribbean basin (the U.K.).
4 The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy 2008, available at [http://graphics.eiu.com/PDF/ Democracy%20Index%202008.pdf], 20 October, 2009.
5 P. Sztompka, Trust: A Sociological Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 146.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
the level of satisfaction with what the public institutions are doing.6 For the purposes of my analysis I intend to deal with the following types of trust:
(1) political trust, i.e. trust in political institutions and leaders;
(2) general or generalized trust—trust in strangers7;
(3) private trust—trust in family members and relatives, friends, members of the same (ethnic, religious, etc.) group.
Private (interpersonal) trust is widespread in the Central Caucasian countries. None of the sociologists, psychologists or political scientists has ever looked at it as undesirable yet the obvious domination of trust in relatives and close members of one’s group over general trust cannot be described as desirable from the economic and political points of view.8 Susan Rose-Ackerman has written the following: “In modern societies, people need to be able to separate their roles as friend and relation from their roles as bureaucrat, politician, judge, employee, or business manager.”9 In other words, social modernization requires that private trust be replaced with trust in the unbiased and legitimate state.
Academic writings offer varied, or even contradictory, recommendations on how to promote trust. Here are some of them:
(A) Civil society produces Trust that promotes Democracy10;
(B) Participation in voluntary associations does not produce trust in others and does not promote democracy11;
(C) Well-functioning democratic governments can create interpersonal trust12;
(D) Democracy does not generate trust.13
There is no clear answer to the question; it seems that there are no universal prescriptions for developing trust: much depends on local specifics. This makes empirical studies of the region doubly important.
The Origins and Assessments of the Level of Trust
The science of politics offers two rivaling explanations—culturological14 and institutional15 theories—of the origins of trust. Here I intend to add another, socio-psychological, explanation—the social identity theory.16
6 See: R. Hardin, “Trusting Persons, Trusting Institutions,” in: Strategy and Choice, ed. by R.J. Zeckhauser, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991, pp. 185-209; O. Patterson, “Liberty against the Democratic State: On the Historical and Contemporary Sources of American Distrust,” in: Democracy and Trust, ed. by M.E. Warren, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 151-207.
7 T. Yamagishi, M. Yamagishi, “Trust and Commitment in the United States and Japan,” Motivation and Emotion, No. 18 (2), 1994, pp. 129-166.
8 See: E.M. Uslaner, “Democracy and Social Capital,” in: Democracy and Trust, pp. 121-150.
9 S. Rose-Ackerman, “Trust, Honesty, and Corruption: Reflection on the State-Building Process,” in: Archives of European Sociology, XLII (3), 2001, pp. 27-71.
10 See: R. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993.
11 See: E.M. Uslaner, “Producing and Consuming Trust,” Political Science Quarterly, No. 115, 2001, pp. 569-590.
12 See: M.E. Warren, “Introduction,” in: Democracy and Trust, pp.121-150.
13 See: R. Inglehart, “Trust, Well-being and Democracy,” in: Democracy and Trust, pp. 88-120.
14 See: Ibidem; R. Putnam, op. cit.
15 See: J. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990; M.J. Hether-ington, “The Political Relevance of Political Trust,” American Political Science Review, No. 92, 1998, pp. 791-808.
16 See: H. Tajfel, J.C. Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict,” in: The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. by W.G. Austin, S. Worchel, Brooks-Cole, Monterey, Calif., 1979.
The culturological theories believe that cultural norms, not politics, are responsible for the emergence of trust: those socialized in different cultures learn to trust people according to the norms accepted in their societies, which is later applied to the political institutions.
The institutional theories, on the other hand, proceed from the assumption that trust is born by what people think about the institutions of power.
The social identity theory concentrates on the role of group identity and self-identification when it comes to the development of trust; it insists that individual attitudes to other people and trust in them are born by one’s belonging to a definite social entity.
Here I have measured the following: the level of national, ethnic, and religious identification; the level of political and general (generalized) trust; and the perception by young people of the degrees of efficiency of different power structures and the level of their satisfaction with life.
I. The level of national, ethnic, and religious identification was measured using a 7-point scale and required answers to the following 12 questions:
(1) To what extent do you believe yourself to be citizen of (followed by the name of the corresponding country)?
(2) To what extent is it important for you to be a citizen of this country?
(3) To what extent do you feel personally offended when someone, not a citizen of your country (the name of the corresponding country follows), criticizes the citizens of your country?
(4) To what extent do you feel strong community with the other citizens of your country?
(5) To what extent do you feel you resemble other members of your ethnic group?
(6) To what extent is it important for you to belong to your ethnic group?
(7) To what extent do you feel personally offended when someone outside your ethnic group criticizes its members?
(8) To what extent are you aware of strong affiliation with other members of your ethnic group?
(9) To what extent do you feel you resemble the other members of your religious group?
(10) To what extent is it important for you to belong to your religious group?
(11) To what extent do you feel offended when someone outside your religious group criticizes members of your religious group?
(12) To what extent are you aware of strong ties with the other members of your religious group?
The medians of the points related to the answers to questions 1 to 4 indicated the level of the respondents’ national affiliation; to the questions 5 to 8, the respondents’ ethnic affiliation; to the questions 9 to 12, the respondents’ religious affiliation.
Fig. 1 demonstrates the level of national, ethnic, and religious identification of certain ethnic groups belonging to ethnic majorities and ethnic minorities in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine.17
The higher the index (the higher the column in the histogram), the higher the level of national, ethnic, or religious identity; the analysis of variance was based on the Kruskall-Wallis test.
17 Fig. 1 shows information relating to the following ethnic minorities: the Armenians in Georgia; the Lezghians and Talyshins in Azerbaijan, and the Crimean Tatars in Ukraine.
Figure 1
Patterns of National, Ethnic, and Religious Identity in Different Ethno-national Groups (by the ethnicity factor, p < .0001)
Fig. 1 clearly shows that different ethnic groups reveal different self-identification patterns. In Georgia, for example, the Georgian majority and the Armenian minority regard religious self-identification as the most important, while among the Azeris and Lezghians this role belongs to ethnic identification. National identification is most important among the Talyshins, which indicates that they are well-integrated into Azeri society. Russians, Ukrainians, and the Crimean Tartars, likewise, attach the greatest importance to their national self-identity.
II. To assess the level of political trust using the 7-point scale, we asked the respondents to identify the level of their trust in the following political leaders and institutions:
(a) local authorities;
(b) the president;
(c) the parliament;
(d) the police;
(e) religious leaders.
The medians of the points gathered by each of the leaders and institutions of power demonstrated the level of trust in them; this is illustrated by Fig. 2.
Figure 2
The Level of Trust in Various Political Leaders and Institutions
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Fig. 2 shows that in Azerbaijan and Russia, the majority trusts the president; in Great Britain, the police; in Georgia, the religious leaders; in Ukraine, the parliament, while in Spain and the Netherlands, the local authorities. My further discussion calls for a clarification of the following.
■ First, the degree of authenticity of the results: it is frequently doubted whether the respondents in non-democratic states are sincere enough.18
■ Second, different cultures might give rise to different interpretations of answers to similar questions about trust.19
18 See: F. Adam, “The Distribution of Social Capital and the Quality of Data from Cross-national Surveys,” in: Social Capital and Governance, ed. by F. Adam, Lit Verlag, Berlin, 2007, pp. 21-50.
19 See: R. Harre, “Trust and Its Surrogates: Psychological Foundations of Political Trust,” in: Democracy and Trust, pp. 249-272.
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The cross-cultural nature of the project, which concentrates on the trends displayed by different societies and relies on certain specific mathematical-statistical procedures to process information obtained, removes, to a certain extent, some of the doubts. In fact, the results were compared, when possible, with similar information obtained within other projects.
I have complemented the project’s results with a comparative analysis of the levels of political trust in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia supplied by the Data Initiative Survey— nationwide annual polls (started in 2004) under the aegis of the Caucasus Research Resource Centers in the three Central Caucasian countries.20
The respondents were asked to assess, using a 5-point scale, their trust in political leaders and institutions; for the purposes of my comparison, I calculated the data related to
(a) the parliament;
(b) the police;
(c) the president.
The median related to each of them demonstrated the level of trust. Fig. 3 shows the results.
Figure 3
The Level of Trust in Political Leaders and Institutions in the Central Caucasian Countries (2004-2008)
20 [http://www.crrccenters.org].
Fig. 3 shows that while in Armenia and especially in Azerbaijan the president enjoys the highest level of trust, in Georgia he is losing the trust of the nation.
III. General (generalized) trust. It was measured in our project using a 7-point scale applied to the answers to the following questions:
(1) Generally speaking, do you believe that you can trust most people or do you think that caution is advised?
(2) Are you convinced that most people will try to take advantage of you, given the chance, or will they try to be fair?
(3) Can you say that people normally try to help others or are they mostly self-centered?
Fig. 4 shows the assessment of the level of general (generalized) trust based on the sums of the medians for the three questions; it also shows the trends of political trust in individual countries.
Figure 4
The Trends of Political and General Trust (by country, p < .0001)
Fig. 4 shows that the lowest level of general trust is observed in Georgia; Azerbaijan comes next with a slightly higher level. Ukraine displays the highest level of general trust.21
21 Ukraine’s relatively high level of generalized trust is confirmed by other projects with larger samplings such as World Values (WVS, 1990) and European values (EVS, 1999).
Some of the countries combine a high level of political trust with a low level of general trust, and vice versa.22 Azerbaijan and Georgia display a more or less similar trend: there is a wide gap between political and general trust, with higher figures for the former.
IV. In order to measure the degree to which young people assess the degree of efficiency of different institutions of power, we asked the respondents to measure the efficiency of the following people or organizations on the basis of a 7-point scale (ranging from 1—“not effective at all” to 7—“very effective”):
■ Local authorities;
■ Prime minister;
■ President;
■ Parliament;
■ The police;
■ Religious leaders.
Fig. 5 shows the results.
Figure 5
Trends of Assessment by Young People of the Efficiency of Different Institutions of Power (by country, p < .0001)
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22 See: R. Rose, C. Haerpfer, “New Democracies Barometer V: A 12 Nation Survey,” Studies in Public Policy (Glasgow, Strathclyde University), No. 302, 1998.
Fig. 5 reveals considerable fluctuations in how young people assess the efficiency of different political institutions and leaders. Young people in Ukraine and Georgia, for example, are of the lowest opinion about the performance of the institutions of power, while the young people of Azerbaijan, on the contrary, have a very high opinion of them.
V. In order to measure the degree to which the respondents were satisfied with life, they were asked to use a 7-point scale (from 1—“completely disagree” to 7—“completely agree”) to assess the level of their agreement with the following:
■ I am satisfied with my life in (the name of the country).
Fig. 6 presents the results.
Figure 6
The Levels of Satisfaction with Life (by country, p < .0001)
Ukraine and Georgia are the countries in which young people are least satisfied with life; the Netherlands is the country in which the youth is most satisfied with life.
VI. At the next stage, we measured the correlation between the types of trust and the earlier results. Table 1 offers the most important correlations.
We found 11 correlations, the most important of which are: political trust correlates more fully with such indices as:
(1) “assessment of efficiency of political institutions and leaders” (r = 0.79, p < .01);
(2) “satisfaction with life” (r = 0.39, p < .01), and much less with
Table 1
Correlation between Trust and Other Indices
Political trust General trust Assessment of efficiency Satisfaction with life Degree of national identification Degree of ethnic identification Degree of religious identification
Political trust — * * CM CM * * cn 1^ * * cn co * * (O .072** * * 7
General trust * * CM CM — * * CM CM .202** CI -.046* -.063**
**Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level; *Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level;
N o t e: CI—correlation is insignificant even at the 5% level.
(3) general (generalized) trust (r = 0.22, p < .01);
(4) the level of religious identification (r = 0.17, p < .01),
(5) the level of national identification (r = 0.17, p < .01), and
(6) the level of ethnic identification (r = 0.07, p < .01).
General (generalized) trust, on the other hand, is weakly correlated with all the indices:
(8) “assessment of efficiency of political institutions and leaders” (r = 0.22, p < .01);
(9) “satisfaction with life” (r = 0.20, p < .01).
A weak negative correlation was discovered with
(10) level of religious identification (r = -0.06, p < .01) and
(11) level of ethnic identification (r = -0.05, p < .05).
The weak, yet negative correlation between general trust and the level of religious and ethnic identification deserves special attention. Fig. 1 revealed that religious identification was especially important for the Armenians and Georgians. Fig. 7 presents the trends in political and general trust, which depends on the respondents’ ethnic affiliation, using the example of Georgia.
Fig. 7 shows that the ethnic, in this case Armenian, factor greatly lowers the level of general trust in Georgian society: the Armenian minority in Georgia, which has an extremely low level of general trust, reduces the already low level of trust in Georgian society.
The weak correlation between political and general trust we identified in our poll confirms the opinion of some researchers that these two types of trust are weakly correlated.23 James Gibson, for example, concluded that in post-communist Russia, “interpersonal trust actually has little to do with attitudes toward democratic institutions and processes.”24
23 See: D. Easton, “A Re-assessment of the Concept of Political Support,” British Journal of Political Science, No. 5, 1975, pp. 435-457; K. Newton, “Social and Political Trust in Established Democracies,” in: Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Governance, ed. by P. Norris, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pp. 169-187.
24 J.L. Gibson, “Social Networks, Civil Society, and the Prospects for Consolidating Russia’s Democratic Transition,” American Journal of Political Science, No. 45, 2001, p. 51.
Figure 7
Trends in Political and General Trust in Georgia (by the ethnicity factor, p < .0001)
More than that: there is the opinion that the trends demonstrated by these types of trust are contradictory. It is asserted, for example, that in democratic societies, political trust should not be too high since a certain degree of mistrust in the government prompts the citizens to carefully monitor what the bureaucrats are doing and control them.25 At the same time, the highest level of general (generalized) trust is registered in the most democratic countries.
The Central Caucasian countries (Azerbaijan and Georgia in particular) demonstrate a very specific combination of a low level of general trust and a relatively high level of trust in the president (in Georgia, however, it has somewhat lowered). A high level of trust in the president was observed in many of the post-communist East European countries.26
It is interesting to note that Georgia, its considerable efforts to build a civil society notwithstanding, demonstrates a comparatively low level of general trust (even if the Armenian factor is ignored). This, and the weak correlation between general trust and the other indices, probably confirms the thesis of the cultural factor or the trust habits inherited by culture.27
In societies where family relations predominate, relatives enjoy greater trust (“private” trust). The Central Caucasian countries belong to this group: people there rarely trust people they do not know (general trust).28 It seems that those (Fukuyama and others) who say that it is very hard to deliberately raise the level of general trust to any noticeable degree are right. It should be said that the
25 See: R. Hardin, op. cit..; R. Inglehart, op. cit.
26 See: W. Mishler, R. Rose, “Trust in Untrustworthy Institutions: Culture and Institutional Performance in Postcommunist Societies,” Studies in Public Policy, No. 10, 1998.
27 See: F. Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, Free Press, New York, 1995.
28 See: R. Wintrobe, “Some Economics of Ethnic Capital Formation and Conflict,” in: Nationalism and Rationality, ed. by A. Breton, G. Galeotti, P.Salmon, R. Wintrobe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 43-70.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
level of general trust in the polyethnic Central Caucasian states (Azerbaijan and Georgia) cannot be raised until the ethnopolitical conflicts in the region are resolved. This is best illustrated by the social attitudes of the Armenian minority in Georgia.
It is no wonder that, after analyzing the experience of the post-communist states, Susan Rose-Ackerman had to admit that the efforts to create general trust in the post-Soviet states never affected, in any noticeable way, the progress of democracy and market relations.29 The post-Soviet reality of the Central Caucasian states creates doubts about the adequacy and effectiveness of these efforts.30
The strong correlation between political trust and the assessment of the effectiveness of the political institutions and leaders our project revealed fully corresponds to the findings of other re-searchers31 and supports the institutional theory that trust is rooted in what people think about the institutions of power. The authors of “Trust in Untrustworthy Institutions: Culture and Institutional Performance in Post-communist Societies” arrived at the same conclusion: they relied on information gathered in Central and Eastern Europe to verify the hypothesis offered by the institutional theories about the sources of trust.32
C o n c l u s i o n
Despite the fact that general (generalized) trust is a useful factor which contributes to social and economic development, the post-Soviet countries of the Central Caucasus need, first and foremost, effective and trustworthy modern institutions and organizations independent of the level of general trust. In other words, state and institutional development should be treated as a priority: the region’s governments should concentrate on building a “contemporary and normally functioning state.”
It is advisable to carry out the following measures:
(a) offer courses in civil society values and national identity at schools, enterprises, and offices;
(b) support voluntary and non-governmental structures (including sport organizations) in which people can learn how to communicate and cooperate, as well as to trust others;
(c) implement effective anti-corruption measures;
(d) settle the ethnopolitical conflicts in the region (the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in particular).
We should bear in mind that democratization in a society which lacks the corresponding traditions is a long and tortuous process which calls for changes in the traditional mindset and world perception, attitude to oneself, and relationships with others, etc. The Western societies covered a long road, which took decades if not centuries of considerable changes and prerequisites, before they arrived at democracy. This suggests two positions (probably a bit simplified and generalized) which can be regarded as two strategies of social development: either support and encouragement of civil society or development of state institutions. It seems that neither taken separately can bring democratization. They should be combined, otherwise the peoples of the Central Caucasus risk becoming hostages of either democratic populism or repressive authoritarianism.
29 See: S. Rose-Ackerman, op. cit.
30 V. Seyidov dwells on some of the aspects of the situation in Azerbaijan which complicate the democratization process in his: V. Seyidov, “How Gradualism Meets Commitment: Azerbaijan’ s Transition to Democracy,” in: Azerbaijan in Global Politics. Crafting Foreign Policy, Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, Baku, 2009, pp. 323-345.
31 See: W.L. Miller, T.Y. Koshechkina, A. Grodeland, “Diffuse Trust or Diffuse Analysis? The Specificity of Political Distrust in Post-communist Europe,” in: Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-communist Europe, ed. by I. Markova, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, pp. 133-156.
32 See: W. Mishler, R. Rose, op. cit.
