Social Capital, Civic Engagement and Democratization in Kurdistan by Hewa Haji Khedir

Author:Hewa Haji Khedir
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030421441
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

To what extent are you willing to talk about political issues in the following social circles?

Loading—Erbil

Loading—Sulaimani

With family members

.581

.591

Your political party/if applicable

.498

.587

Your nation fellows

.596

.767

Your close friends

.722

.773

Others from the same gender

.779

.807

With your relatives

.556

.795

Your religious fellows

.780

.801

Created by the Author

The strong readiness of respondents to talk about politics within the religious in-group is consistent with the fact that religion is one of the most important issues for respondents. This trend is obvious as 96% of respondents stated that religion is a very important or fairly important issue in their life and that 68% of respondents expressed trust in their religious in-group. Furthermore, the high loading for readiness to talk about politics with same-gender and close friends reflects the fact that in Kurdish society people tend to have close friends from the same gender. Except for students in higher education institutions and some governmental organizations, in other arenas of life, opportunities for building cross-gender social relationships tend to be limited. In this regard, approximately 40% of respondents demonstrated that they have social networks that include same-gender individuals. This percentage, after networks with colleagues in the workplace and relatives, is the highest among social networks. This means that close friends, who are mostly from the same gender, constitute a trustworthy social circle for political discussion.

Interestingly, respondents expressed a fairly weak tendency to talk about politics within family and social circles of relatives. One can suggest that people’s reluctance to talk about politics within family social circles does not necessarily mean that family is not a trustworthy social unit, but rather that they consider politics in general as not a very crucial issue. Results of the study indicate that politics is the least important—roughly 48% of respondents reported that politics is not an important issue for them. In fact, the results of some questions show that family constitutes one of the main and most trustworthy sources of information for respondents. In this regard, more than 90% of respondents displayed trust in the information they receive from family members. This holds a great deal of relevance for relatives as well. Likewise, 73% of respondents reported that they trust their relatives a lot or do so completely. Moreover, one can suppose that size of the family may matter as well: the survey sample in Erbil includes 41 and in Sulaimani 49% of sample units who live in small-sized families of 2–4 persons. It is likely that as number of adult members decline in small-sized families, the interest in political discussions diminishes accordingly. Hence, in the two cities, the significance of social circles does not change considerably, what varies is mostly the intensity of trust in social circles.

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