Just a note to cite a very nice article by Michaela Stankova in the Slovak Spectator on political parties.  Not only is the article completely faithful to our email interview, but it does a nice job of balancing our conversation with comments from others including Miroslav Kusy.  The complete article is here: http://spectator.sme.sk/articles/view/37997/2/polls_suggest_centre_right_comeback.html

With 8 parties potentially entering Slovakia’s parliament there are 255 different coalition possibilities.  Fortunately, not withstanding Bismark’s aphorism that “Politics is the art of the possible,” there are quite a few coalition possibilities that we can exclude and in the end we can narrow down the possibilities to a relatively small number.  In the paragraphs [...]

For once I’ll get the lead on the Slovak press and talk about a poll first, the results of which I have added to the Dashboard.  Median published its January poll results today and they have their effects on the overall averages, pushing the MKP-SMK average below 5% for the first time in my dataset, [...]

How well do public opinion polls in Slovakia predict election outcomes?  Well as the previous post suggests, not too well.  But they’re all we’ve got.  Of course we could always wait until the future comes to us, but, frankly, where’s the fun in that.  So rather than sit around and wait or make faulty predictions, [...]

Though the results are not encouraging, I will still look at the topography of party support based on polls. They are the proverbial lamppost under which we search for our lost keys–the keys may not be there but everywhere else is too dark.

Sometimes it pays to stop and think before sitting down to write.  Every major Slovak daily yesterday reported on the results of the February poll by the firm FOCUS.  And every one told the same story. SME: Poll: SDKU falls after Fico’s attacks; SaS rises (Prieskum: SDKÚ po ataku Fica klesla, SaS ide hore) Pravda: [...]

Yesterday I discussed my plan to undertake a relatively systematic analysis of Slovakia’s parties. I intend to get some additional insight by doing the analysis but preliminary look at the data suggest the following conclusions about where parties have been and where they are going. I hope that I will actually change some of these [...]

Only with SNS below the threshold and HZDS below the threshold or lured by the current opposition is it possible currently to envision a non-Smer government taking office in 2010.

Lots of news from Slovakia in the past two weeks, some obvious and some not. In addition to changes in Slovakia’s leading opposition party SDKU-DS, the reports of recent days have also included a series of other minor revelations and lots and lots of polling data including some new sources.  I’ll try to address some [...]

Those of you who are not deeply interested in how Slovaks vote (i.e. nearly everybody) can tune out.  Those of you who are interested, I understand your pain, and you can now find all of this blog’s monthly public opinion graphs available in one place by clicking the “Dashboard” link on the top of every [...]