Migration and public trust in the commonwealth of independent states

ABSTRACT

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the post-Soviet space has seen regional integration in the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The CIS while moribund has affected migration in the post-Soviet space. Despite its persistence and effect on migration, few studies have sought to explore public perceptions towards the CIS. We address this limitation by developing several arguments, anchored on the literature on public opinion and European integration, to explain how perceptions towards migrants and employment status affect public trust in the CIS. Our analyses make use of the sixth wave of the World Values Survey that includes seven CIS member-states and finds strong support for our hypotheses. Our contribution lies in the investigation of public attitudes in a non-EU setting while applying arguments from EU literature and the wide coverage of our study compared to the extant literature on the CIS and public opinion.

KEYWORDS:

• Public opinion
• trust
• regional integration
• commonwealth of independent states
• migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Not all former Soviet Union states are members. For example, all the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania focused their efforts on joining the European Union. CIS members have included Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Georgia has left the CIS in 2009 following its dispute with Russia.

2 Several explanations have been offered to better understand the lacklustre performance of the CIS. One explanation focuses on divergent policies member-states pursued following the demise of the Soviet Union and as they sought to establish themselves as independent states (Gleason 2001; Hansen 2015; Kuzio 2000; Libman and Vinokurov 2012; Sakwa and Webber 1999). Others argue member-states’ reluctance to commit to an organization dominated by Russia as another reason for the CIS’ poor performance (Kramer 2008; Vinokurov 2007). Kobrinskaya (2007, 20) argues “Moscow traditionally understands only a paternalist type of integration, which presupposes preferential treatment in exchange for following Moscow’s policy.” Such an approach has influenced some of the other CIS members to be reluctant about enhancing regional integration within CIS (Hansen 2015; Kramer 2008).

3 One study by Kudaibergenova (2016) uses these descriptive statistics to evaluate public attitudes towards the Eurasian Economic Union in her explanation of motivations of elites in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to seek regional integration. Another study making use of the EDB data is that of Karabchuk, Moiseeva, and Gurkina (2015) who also examine summary statistics of these data on variations of perceptions towards integration.

4 For more information, visit http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV6.jsp.

5 Azerbaijan, a member-state of the CIS, is included in Wave 6 but dropped from our analysis because the question about the CIS was not asked in the country.

6 The exact wording of the question is the following:

I am going to name a number of organizations. For each one, could you tell me how much confidence you have in them? Is it a great deal of confidence, quite a lot of confidence, not very much confidence, or none at all?

It is important to point out that the English version of the WVS uses the word confidence instead of trust. However, доверие is the word used in the Russian version of the WVS, which is closer to trust in English.

7 We also treat all the “Don’t know”, “No answer”, and “Missing” as missing values for our independent variables.

8 Exact question wording for this question is: “Were you born in this country or are you an immigrant?”

9 The question is worded as follows:

Are the tasks you do at work mostly manual or mostly intellectual? If you do not work currently, characterize your major work in the past. Use this scale where 1 means ‘mostly manual tasks’ and 10 means ‘mostly intellectual tasks’.

10 We have also tried different measures of education levels (e.g. primary education) but the results for our key independent variables remain substantively the same.

11 First, we applied a more restrictive definition and used 1, instead of 3, as a threshold. Second, we also coded the variable using the original 10-point scale.