09 May

Facebook in Armenia, May 2018

fb

It has been awhile since I last blogged about Facebook use in the Caucasus. Again, here is a guide to how I get these data. Click on the tags for previous rates – here’s September 2017.

As of May 2018, there are about 1,200,000 Facebook users in Armenia, according to Facebook. That is 40% of the total population, and 37% of the population over age 14 (Facebook technically isn’t available to those under 13.)

As far as gender, 40% of the total male population, or 51% of males over age 14 are on Facebook. 43% of the total female population, or 49% of the female 14+ population. So there are some gender differences, but probably within the margin of error.

Just looking at the 15-24 year olds, 87% of them are on the site, 82% of young men and 92% of young women. (These numbers dropped a bit since last September).

30 Apr

Political change in Armenia

Armenia experienced its most profound political change since becoming independent when former President and briefly Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan resigned. Sargsyan served two terms as president of Armenia, but in 2015, he changed the constitution which moved Armenia from a semi-presidential system to a parliamentary one. Then, despite promising otherwise, he was elected Prime Minister by his party immediately after his last presidential term ended this month.

This sparked a protest organized by opponents to Sargsyan, opposition coalition Yelk (Way Out), but mostly the Civil Contract Party. These efforts were lead by charismatic multilingual 42-year-old opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan. Pashniyan is no newcomer, he has been battling Sargsyan for a decade.

I’m writing about the protests in other venues, but one of my main points is that Armenians were READY for this. Here are some analyses from the Caucasus Barometer to support this. (The CB has some nice online data analysis tools, but I made my own graphics to show some points better visually).

Armenians don’t trust Sargsyan [link to CB].

This line graph shows that the trust/distrust threshold was crossed in 2010 and for the past few years, very few Armenians trusted Sargsyan and many distrusted him.

This is a bar graph version of above. You can see that trust basically swapped.

Similarly, people were unhappy with the direction that politics were going on [link to CB].

Although don’t knows and refuse to answers were high, in the past few years, very few Armenians felt that the country was going in the right direction.

Armenians have been fairly consistent in their opinion about Armenia being a democracy [link to CB].

Election fraud and manipulation was widely connected with Sargsyan and the CB shows it [link to CB].

Additionally, Armenians are pretty keen on criticizing their government and protesting against it. [Link to CB on being critical] [Link to CB on protest]

Also, compared to Azerbaijan and Georgia, Armenians are especially keen on these things. (These are from the 2013 CB, the last that compared all 3 countries – critical, protest).

….

Added May 1 – trust toward Parliament [link to CB]

18 Apr

Facebook in Azerbaijan, April 2018

It has been quite awhile since I last blogged about Facebook use in the Caucasus. Again, here is a guide to how I get these data. Click on the tags for previous rates.

According to Facebook, as of April 2018, around 2,900,000 Azerbaijanis, about 30% of the total population, or more accurately, 28% of the population over age 14, are on Facebook.

Over half of all Azerbaijani men (over age 14) are on Facebook (well, 55%) and 26% of Azerbaijani women (over age 14) are on Facebook. This has been the trend for as long as I’ve been tracking this.

Looking at just youth, about 56% of Azerbaijanis ages 15-24 use Facebook. 73% of males that age and 37% of females that age. In September of 2016, 58% of young men were on the site while 31% of young women were. It seems that there was a huge growth in use by young men, but much less with young women.

As always, these numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt. This is information from Facebook ads.

05 Dec

Books in childhood households, Eurasia, 2015

via GIPHY

The EBRD Life in Transition survey from 2015 asked participants about their childhood – “About how many books were in your childhood home? Do not count magazines, newspapers, or school books.”

Books in the childhood home is frequently used as a predictor of future educational attainment. But I’m curious for another reason. Some people argue that Azerbaijan, as a whole, isn’t as interested in reading/literacy/education as some other countries. This seemed like an interesting way to test this. Now of course, books cost money, so there is a tremendous influence of wealth here. Also note the high don’t knows in Azerbaijan – people are nervous about taking surveys there.

05 Dec

Political system preferences in Eurasia, 2015

I’ve been playing with the 2015 EBRD Life in Transition survey dataset for the past few days. I saw an interesting question about political system preferences.

Whereby people were asked to agree most with one of these statements:
* Democracy is preferable to any other form of political system

* Under some circumstances, an authoritarian government may be preferable
to a democratic one

* For people like me, it does not matter whether a government is democratic
or authoritarian

or don’t know

The results were pretty exciting. We have to acknowledge, of course, that many people know that the “right” answer is “democracy!!!!” so there is some social desirability at play here. But nonetheless, the results are telling.

Check out all of those “don’t knows” in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan!

04 Dec

Azerbaijan – 2015 sources of information

The EBRD Life in Transition survey changed their wording on this question quite a bit this wave, so it is difficult to compare to the past. But here I present the frequency of Azerbaijanis using various media as an information source.  The question says: “People use different sources to learn what is going on in their country and the world. For each of the following sources, please indicate how often you use it:” with a variety of choices from never to daily.

I find the talking with others at 73% really interesting. As comparison, here are other countries in the region:

04 Dec

Armenia – 2015 sources of information

The EBRD Life in Transition survey changed their wording on this question quite a bit this wave, so it is difficult to compare to the past. But here I present the frequency of Armenians using various media as an information source.  The question says: “People use different sources to learn what is going on in their country and the world. For each of the following sources, please indicate how often you use it:” with a variety of choices from never to daily.

Not surprisingly, TV rules. Magazines aren’t very popular in Armenia.

04 Dec

Frequency of using the Internet and social media as an information source in Eurasia, 2015

The EBRD Life in Transition survey changed their wording on this question quite a bit this wave, so it is difficult to compare to the past. But here I present the frequency of Eurasians using the Internet and social media as an information source.  The question says: “People use different sources to learn what is going on in their country and the world. For each of the following sources, please indicate how often you use it:” with a variety of choices from never to daily.

This is Internet

and social media

It is hard to say if people understood the difference between the Internet and social media. I’d guess that they did not. I eyeball’d the crosstabs and it seems that the nevers in both groups are pretty heavily overlapping.

And, of course, anyone that knows anything about media consumption knows that the vast majority of people get their news from TV. Nonetheless, I wanted to also provide a bit of context for the South Caucasus, Russia, and Turkey. If you’re interested in other countries, please contact me.

More to come!

04 Dec

PC/tablet ownership in Eurasia in 2015

A few years ago I made some graphics and a blog post showing personal computer ownership in Europe and Eurasia based on the EBRD’s Life in Transition survey.

Last week I presented these data to some graduate students and that reminded me that I should update this! There are 2015-2016 data available and the picture has changed quite a bit. Also, notably, the question wording changed. Now people are asked if anyone in their household owns a personal computer, laptop, or tablet and if they don’t is it because they cannot afford it or for another reason. I present both here.


Link to the original image