Rati Shubladze

Rati Shubladze is a researcher with ten years of experience carrying out quantitative and qualitative research in Georgia and the South Caucasus. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Tbilisi State University. He teaches at several Georgian universities and is currently affiliated with the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA), serving as the head of the Sociology Program. Besides academic activities, he also works as the Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator of Securing Access to Free Expression (SAFE) program at IREX. He is involved in the Second Corporate-level evaluation of IFAD’s Decentralization at the Independent Office of Evaluation of UN IFAD.Previously, Rati has been working on the large-N survey management, including fieldwork supervision, questionnaire development, programming, and data cleaning while working at the CRRC-Georgia. For 16 months he served as a research director of TMI Georgia – Georgian TV Audience Measuring company. Among others, Rati has participated in the two global desk research projects, assessing transparency of the think tanks, and collecting the data about the violent conflicts and political events through online sources. Furthermore, he was part of the academic research projects focusing on the youth, history, and culture, funded by European Commission, Heinrich Boell Foundation, and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. His academic interests include elections, post-soviet transformation, Europeanization, and youth culture.