Yearly Archives: 2010

Slovakia Election Update: Pictures worth at least 300 words

I love polling results and I am always surprised and unhappy when they are abused.  Recent articles in SME and Pravda put needless stress on these results by, on the one hand, treating them as unique and absolute indicators of a party’s success or failure (at least until the next one comes out) and, on the other hand, lumping them together into time series regardless of their origin or methodology.  Toward this end, I propose that we fix this by, on the one hand, treating each poll as a unique series which is to be compared to other series, and, on the other hand, when we do lump them together into time series, we smooth them out and look less at individual polls and more at overall trends.  I’ve tried to do both of those things here with some overall coalition/opposition graphs that, I think, speak for themselves in various ways (though that probably won’t stop me from trying to speak for them at some future point.

Coalition, Slovak Right and Hungarian total support according to various polling agencies (and averaged), 2008-2010

Monthly averages of public opinion preferences, smoothed with LOESS, in Slovakia 2002-2010

Monthly averages of public opinion preferences for all major parties in Slovakia, 2002-2010, smoothed with LOESS

Opposition party support, smoothed

Polls, Politics and Parties, Part 9: How Experts (and Bookmakers) Second Guess the Polls

In the eight previous posts in this series (and in this blog in general) I’ve used public opinion as the basic raw-material, but pollsters in Central Europe are quick to note that public opinion only talks about the “current” state of affairs and does not predict what people do once they enter the voting booth.  They walk a fine line on this point, between irrelevance on one hand (if pollsters admit that polls do not predict elections, why should we pay attention to them?) and embarrassment on the other (when the “normal” 24% gap between polls and actual results causes people to notice that polls do not do a very good job of predicting elections).  But the world is full of people who, like myself, who are uncomfortable with waiting for news and need some early indicators, at least, of how things will turn out (my wife has learned from my uncomfortable fidgeting when she says “I have news…” to include a spoiler like “and it’s not bad news, or at least not very bad news.”  This inability to deal with uncertainty in the political world drives me (and perhaps a few other people) to use whatever resources are available to look for the best way to predict the future.

If polls aren’t it, then what is?  In a previous post, I’ve looked at alternative quantitative measures for second-guessing the polls–committed voters, committed turnout, past trends–of which only the last seems to have much value (hence my rather cautious use of it).  But the human brain is a marvelous thing, and the answers may not be easily found in the aggregation of statistics, however interesting they are in their own right.  The secret is to find the right brain, or perhaps better said, to know which brain is the right one.  In this we are limited to those who are willing to share the Slovak-election-related contents of their respective brains.  Ideally we would have a significant number of people who have looked carefully at the available information and made an educated guess.  How do we know if they have done so?  Well without close attention to their study habits, the best way is to see whether they have something to gain if they are right (or something to lose if they are wrong).   The discussion boards of SME, Pravda, HN and other news outlets are full of people willing to hazard a guess, but with few consequences for failure (especially since so many are anonymous).  I am left, therefore with two main sources:  those who stand to lose their reputations and those who stand to lose their money.  Among those with reputations at stake, I do not include politicians, whose prognostications are never expected to be true (Pal Csaky predicts 10% for SMK) and so we are left with a small cadre of political scientists and pollsters who are willing to make their guesses public, and I will reference them here.  In particular, I am grateful to Martin Slosiarik (this is only one of the many realms in which I owe him gratitude) for being willing to make his predictions public, and to make them narrow enough to be useful (though he cleverly shies away from one of the hardest questions).

Among those with money at stake, there is the growing field of those who bet on politics (actually has been extremely common in certain past eras) and a whole discourse has arisen about the predictivness of odds markets.  In my own experience, these markets have done quite well in predicting obscure (to me) local races in the US.  They are subject to manipulation, of course, but the more people become involved, the more difficult this becomes.  Slovakia lacks a true odds market for politics.    SME‘s “crystal ball” at http://zajtrajsie.sme.sk/ is a great first step, but the gains, as far as I can tell, are not particularly valuable (the S€ used in the betting cannot yet be used to buy beer) and so participants may make guesses without much genuine forethought, and since this is the first attempt, we won’t be able to tell until the results are in and the markets close (though this is something I will follow closely).  The only other source we have are the people who make their money by encouraging others to bet.  Bookmakers have a strong vested interest in setting the odds right and they can only do that if they make the right kind of predictions.  So in addition to the political scientists and pollsters, it is interesting to look at what the bookies say.

What I have therefore done is to create charts for each party that show the range predicted by Martin Slosiarik, a rough guess based on current poll average projected out two months based on current trends (my own rather superficial method, though one that did not work badly in the recent Czech election) and then the four bookmakers I have been able to find.  In each case a dark bar represents the baseline: in Slosiarik’s case it is the center point of his predicted range, in my case it is the current poll average, and in the case of the bookmakers it is the inflection point of the bet itself (“Will SaS exceed 10% or fall short”).  The small vertical line leading from it shows direction: in Slosiarik’s case the lines show his full range; in the case of the average poll results it shows the what the “two-month-out” method would predict; in the case of the bookmakers, it is a rough assessment of which side the odds favor.  The longer the line, the more the odds favor a result in that direction (it is not a direct measure of what result the party will actually achieve).

What do we learn from these?  For lack of a better method, let me go party by party as I usually do with poll results:

Smer.  I will begin the analysis of Smer numbers in reverse order on the graph below, beginning with the four wagering firms (British firm bwin.com, and firms operating in Slovakia, Doxx, Fortuna and VictoryTip [unlike last election, Nike.sk and Tipos.sk do not appear to be participating].

Betting odds can be hard to compare because the bets of this type are intrinsically binary and must begin from a particular baseline.  In the case of Smer, each of the four begins from a different baseline, though these are relatively close together, spanning a narrow range between 32.0 and 33.5.   These baselines appear in these cases to reflect the odds firm’s baseline guess, and the odds then suggest its subsequent adjustment.  For Bwin and Doxx the odds were even at last check, but both Fortuna and VictoryTip put slightly shorter odds on Smer receiving more than their respective 32.5 and 33 suggesting an outcome slightly above 33.  Average these together and you get an outcome of about 33% predicted by the odds markets as of 8 June.  This is not far from the 34.8 minus 1.4 = 33.4 suggested by the (two-month-out”) poll prediction.  Interestingly, however, it is rather higher than Slosiarik’s 30-33 range or the 30.5/30.6 prediction I derive from two separate but highly consistent SME odds markets (http://zajtrajsie.sme.sk/stavka/pridajstavku/447 and http://zajtrajsie.sme.sk/stavka/pridajstavku/520).  Which of these is more accurate is impossible to say at the moment.  SME readers tend to be somewhat more free market oriented than others and this may represent a bit of wishful thinking.  Slosiarik, on the other hand, knows these numbers inside and out and and seems convinced of the softness of Smer support (he may well be right, but we won’t know for 4 more days).

SNS. For SNS the baseline measures of three of the four betting firms is the same–7.5 while the fourth is lower at 6.5.  All but one suggest a slight downward trend with an implied average of around 7.0.  This is also the median of Slosiarik’s 6-8 range.  It is interesting that for this party–the betting and expert models are most out of sync with the average polling results, which are under 6 or the trend, which would point the party even lower.  This may be because these experts believe in the (not insignificant) effect of recent Hungarian policy decisions and/or believe that some Slovaks may be hiding their vote for a party that says publicly what some people think privately but might not be willing to admit.   It is difficult for me to disagree with the experts in order to engage in some wishful thinking of my own.

HZDS. HZDS is even more consistent than Smer or SNS.  Only one betting firm even put HZDS’s baseline above the magical 5% threshold and that one, like all the others, put shorter odds on the party falling below the baseline, which in three out of the four cases means below the threshold for entry into parliament.  Likewise Slosiarik puts HZDS in a 4-6 range that sets its median at 5%, though he carefully does not make any predictions about whether it will be slightly above or slightly below.  The opinion polls here weigh in on the negative, both in terms of absolute numbers and two-months-out trend which puts it closer to 4 than to 5.  (The SME odds markets also give HZDS a less than even chance of returning to parliament: 42.8:57.2.  (http://zajtrajsie.sme.sk/stavka/pridajstavku/87)

SDKU. SDKU has a relatively narrow range of baselines but rather broader range of odds spreads (even though one of the firms, Bwin, does not include the party among its range of bets.  The range hovers between 14.5 and 16.  Public opinion polls put the party at 15 with no discernible trend while Slosiarik puts it higher, on the grounds that it may pick up some voters who at the last moment decide that they are not comfortable voting for SaS (This may be the grounds for Fortuna’s quite short odds on the party receiving more than the baseline).  Still, even this does not change the range particularly.

KDH. KDH produces very consistent results: 9.5 or slightly above.  This is true whether you look at the four betting firms, all of which chose the same baseline, or at Slosiarik’s 8-11 range or at the current polls which put the party at 10%.  This is, not coincidentally also the party’s basic result for nearly every parliamentary election in which it has run independently since 1990, though that itself is rather odd since the party has changed, its voters have changed, its leaders have changed, the country has changed and yet KDH manages the same old 10% every time.

SaS. SaS shows a relatively narrow range of baselines–from 8.5 to 10.0 with odds pointing in opposite directions (the lowest baseline, Doxx giving short odds for a higher score and the highest baseline, Fortuna, giving short odds for a lower score.  They meet somewhere around the middle–around the 9.5 that is in the middle of Slosiarik’s range.  As with SNS, SaS odds and experts differ from the polling average for the party and its trend, perhaps reflecting insider knowledge (or the belief therein) that new parties poll high and then end up lower (as I’ve discussed above, this was true for almost every new party to enter Slovakia’s system: ZRS, SOP, ANO, Smer, HZD, SF) but, interestingly, it was not true for the Czech VV which in many ways is quite similar to SaS or for the rather different but equally new TOP09.  I tend to agree with the experts in pegging SaS down a few points but the Czech case gives me just a bit of pause.

MKP-SMK. MKP has an extremely evenset of baselines–between 5.5 and 6.0 with only the barest hint of a trend in one or two. This is identical to the public opinion average.  Both are lower than Slosiarik’s range of 6 to 8.  The betting firms may just be playing it safe here since there is really no way of telling here.  Slosiarik clearly expects voters to fall back to MKP from Most (just as he seems to expect them to fall back to SDKU from SaS.  As above, there is good reason to agree but past precedent may not always dictate current action.  This is the question I will be most curious to see answered on election day.

Most-Hid. Surprisingly to me, Most-Hid has the most consistent set of baselines–all at 5.5–and odds (nothing shorter than 1.75 or longer than 1.85).  The reason that this is surprising is that Most-Hid has perhaps the most unpredictable electorate.  We really have little basis for judging whether they will switch back to the tried and true MKP at the last minute, as Slosiarik clearly thinks many will.  He says Most-Hid will be “very close to 5%” but if you look at his prediction for MKP-SMK and assume that the total electorate for Hungarian parties is less than 12%, his actual prediction seems to be slightly lower than 50-50 that Most-Hid will make it into parliament, something that he probably avoided saying directly lest it produce the headline “FOCUS expert rules out Most-Hid”

So what happens when we put all of these together?  The table below gives a rough estimate of the median point of the odds-makers. (There is no simple way to calculate these because there is no pure way to factor in what the odds mean for preferences.  Very short odds on a party that has a baseline of 5.0 might mean that the pollster is absolutely certain that the party will finish with 4.9 or that it will finish with 2.0.  Of course all things being equal the shorter or longer odds are likely to be somehow proportional to the distance from the baseline since that distance is the most probable basis for certainty.  If there’s anybody in the odds business who can set me straight, I’d very much appreciate it.)

Party Odds Markets Slosiarik
Percentage Seats Percentage Seats
Model Minus
Most-Hid		 Model Minus
Most-Hid		 Minus
HZDS		 Minus
Most-Hid
and HZDS
Smer 33.0 58 62 31.5 52 55 55 59
SNS 7.0 12 13 7.0 12 12 12 13
HZDS 4.8 0 0 5.0 8 9 0 0
SDKU 15.5 27 29 16.5 27 29 29 31
KDH 9.8 16 17 9.5 11 12 12 13
SaS 9.0 10 11 9.5 16 16 17 17
MK 5.5 17 18 7.0 8 0 9 0
Most 5.5 10 5.0 16 17 16 17
Current Coalition 44.8 70 75 43.5 72 76 67 72
Current Opposition 45.3 80 75 47.5 78 74 83 78

The results are not particularly auspicious for the current coalition as it depends on two narrow chances: HZDS in parliament and Most-Hid out.  Without both of these conditions–the odds makers narrowly predict HZDS’s exclusion–the best Smer could hope for (according to the oddsakers, at least) would be for the failure of Most-Hid which in this case would produce a 75-75 split.  Otherwise, Smer will need to reach across the aisle or face the possibility of an opposition coalition.  Slosiarik’s slightly different numbers produce the same conclusion.  Only the presence of HZDS and absence of Most-Hid produces a coalition majority in his model, and then only a very narrow one.

Indeed the striking piece of information here, beyond the importance of thresholds to which I’ve alluded on numerous occasions, is the narrowness of governmental margins.  Slovakia may be entering a period that looks a bit like recent Czech political history with fragile or even minority governments (especially if MKP-SMK were to become untouchable”).

Of course all this depends on whether the odds makers and experts know what they are talking about.

P.S. Want to bet on this?  You can figure out from the above where the best odds are.  Here are the oddsmakers:

https://www.bwin.com/politicsB

Bureau of Meaningless Statistics: The (Non)Effect of Undecided Voters

There is an old saying that “figures don’t lie, but liars do figure” (which I’m sure has some equivalent in almost every language) and there is a wonderful book written in 1954 provocatively entitled “How to Lie with Statistics.”  In Slovakia’s election coverage in 2010 the challenge is not so much statistical lies as lazyness.  Figures appear from various polling firms and they are duly published by newspapers that what people to pay attention whether they have solid basis in fact (nobody’s lying, per se, but they also have no way of knowing whether they are telling the truth) or whether they have any impact.  As a case in point take today’s article in SME, “Smer and SaS can score among undecideds.” (HN does the same)  It is, perhaps, interesting that this is the case, but the article makes little effort to deal with the two real underlying questions:

  • First, is this a useful way of adjusting polling numbers? I don’t know, but neither does SME.  I don’t have any evidence imediately at hand, though I will look to see if I have any precedents from 2006.
  • Second, if this were useful in adjusting numbers, would it have any effect on the overall outcome.  Here the calculation is the work of about 5 minutes at a spreadsheet (use focus data to figure out the overall share of undecideds, multiply this by the percentages printed in the article, add this to the original percentage gained by the party, recalculate to equal 100).  The results are in the table below.  And the answer is “not much”
Party May Poll Share Share among undecideds Contribution of undecideds Revised preferences
(sums to more than 100)		 Revised total share
Smer 35.3 16.9 2.6 37.9 34.6
SDKU 14.0 6.6 1.0 15.0 13.7
SaS 13.3 12.8 1.9 15.2 13.9
KDH 8.3 5.8 0.9 9.2 8.4
SNS 6.1 3.5 0.5 6.6 6.1
MK 5.9 2.8 0.4 6.3 5.8
Most-Hid 5.6 4.6 0.7 6.3 5.8
HZDS 5.1 3.5 0.5 5.6 5.1
KSS 1.6 1.6 1.5
Unie 0.8 0.8 0.7
SDL 0.8 0.8 0.7
Paliho Kapurkova 0.7 4.0 0.9 1.6 1.4
ND 0.7 0.7 0.6
EDS 0.7 0.7 0.6
ZRS 0.6 0.6 0.5
Nase Slovensko 0.4 0.4 0.4
SRK 0.1 0.1 0.1
Azen 0.0 0.0 0.0
100.0 109.4 100.0
Won’t vote 16.1
Undecided 15.1

No party shifts its share by more than 0.7 percentage points, no party drops below the threshold, and the only shift in relative ranking is that SaS slightly overtakes SDKU (and Most-Hid ties MKP-SMK).  And what effect would this have on overall parliamentary outcomes?  Well almost nothing. As the graph below shows, run these percentages through the seat calculator and you get the following results: Current coalition minus 1, current opposition plus 1.

May Parliamentary Seats Revised Parliamentary Seats Seat Change
Smer 57 56 -1
SDKU 23 22 -1
SaS 21 22 +1
KDH 13 14 +1
SNS 10 10 0
MK 9 9 0
Most-Hid 9 9 0
HZDS 8 8 0
150 150

Buried in these results is actually a strong incentive for papers to do the deeper (which is to say not very deep at all, but at least not utterly superficial) calculation.  The coalition v. opposition numbers for the original FOCUS poll (without undecideds) is 75:75.  Add in the undecideds and we get a new parliamentary balance: Coalition 74, Opposition 76.  Had SME only run the numbers, could have run the equally meaningless but far sexier headline, “Undecideds give opposition majority in parliament.”  Maybe it’s a good thing that the busy reporters at Slovakia’s papers don’t have time to do the extra work.

Czech Election Update: The Election in Pictures

No major news that I want to blog about today–or more precisely nothing that I have time to address–but I wanted to post two pictures from Prague sent to me by friend and Fulbright colleague Andrew Yurkovsky.  The first is technically not an election photo–he took it during the World Hockey Championship final–but it captures something very important.  The second captures someone very important.

Ma vlast, by Andrew Yurkovsky, Prague 2010

Admiral, by Andrew Yurkovsky

Admiral, by Andrew Yurkovsky, Prague 2010

Slovakia Dashboard News: AZEN and the sound of one poll clapping

Almost a month ago, I reported doubts about the poll produced by the previously unknown pollster AVVM.  Last week, AVVM issued a new poll, but though it only increased my doubts, I decided not to report on it because even too-credulous (or circulation focused) Pravda described the results as “strange” (cudny) and a search of other major news outlets produce other stories worth responding to and trying to correct.  And yesterday an article in SME by Miroslav Kern (“Pre-election juggling with preferences“) dealt nicely with the issue in broader terms.  I try not to do what the Slovak press is already doing well (and despite my occasional criticism, there is a lot that they do well) and so I figured there was nothing to write about here.

And then, in a search for results of another idiosyncratic poll (Presov University, on which more later) I found myself on the website of Novy cas.

I generally do not read Novy cas, as it does not have a particularly serious reputation, but I realize now that I should read it more often, for a variety of reasons.  My first reaction to the Novy cas election website (after getting over my annoyance that it required me to download Microsoft Silverlight to even work) was “Wow.”  Not only does the website look great (waving Slovak flag and all) but it had a “Your Ideal Quiz” (because of Silverlight I can’t actually link to it but the page it is on is here: http://volby.cas.sk/) that actually asked pretty good questions, showed the result of each answer on the suitability of particular parties and, when I tried to make answers point to a certain party, actually increased the score for that party.  So far so good.

Novy cas also has lots of party information all in one place: tagged news stories, party list, party program (with an interesting mini-wordle that shows the most common word in the party’s program), and development of party preferences over time.  This last, however, raised some questions: it listed only one poll per week, but polls in Slovakia are not done on a weekly basis so the polls must come from different sources and so cannot be easily compared. It did not list the sources, so I had to reconstruct it by comparing the data to my own poll database.  The first of the four turned out to be FOCUS, the second Polis and the third and fourth…AVVM (a detail that Kern didn’t know or was too polite to mention).  Let me restate that in stronger terms:

The self-proclaimed “most read daily newspaper on the internet” is (without telling anybody) basing its election infographics on the product of an untested polling firm with polls that are highly problematic.

Spot the Problematic Poll

How do we know that AVVM is problematic.  In my previous post on AVVM’s first poll, I showed that the firm’s results were far from the median polling numbers of other firms or even from the overall range of those results.  The second AVVM poll does not change this assessment in any meaningful way, as the following eight graphs show (AVVM is in yellow; the Presov University poll that I discuss below is in pink):

For the current government parties, AVVM’s second poll is not so out of line.  In its first poll AVVM produced exceptionally low results for Smer (orange), though by the second poll this had moved up (and other polls had moved down) until it lay in a more normal range.  Likewise AVVM is in the normal range for SNS and HZDS.

Among the Slovak opposition parties, AVVM produced fairly average results for SaS and KDH but quite high for SDKU.

It is for smaller parties that AVVM produces the oddest numbers (both in real and especially in percentage terms.  Most-Hid results are fairly average but numbers for SMK are exeptionally low–lower even than the low results produced by Median.

Of course the biggest variation from the norm, and the one that attracted Pravda‘s “strange” headline is the party’s results for AZEN, the new party formed by HZDS defectors Zdenka Kramplova and Milan Urbani.  I have not created a dashboard graph for this party because its numbers are actually so low that most polling firms do not report it.  To compensate for the lack of full data, I’ve created an approximation graph which gives AZEN the benefit of the doubt (assuming that it just barely misses the threshold for reporting).  Even giving it the benefit of the doubt, the results are striking:

AVVM results for AZEN are so far from the norm of the other four major firms (and from the Presov University poll as well) that they simply cannot be taken seriously.  It may be that AVVM is right and the others are wrong, but nothing in my experience would suggest that to be the case.

Furthermore, the explanations for this divergence given to SME by AVVM director Martin Palásek are so bad as to disqualify the firm from any further consideration:

  • The first explanation: “the party is first on the alphabetical list of parties” and may therefore draw additional support (To prove I’m not making this up: “Konateľ AVVM Martin Palásek výsledok AZEN vysvetľuje najmä tým, že sú prví v abecede, a tak ich uvádzali aj na anketových lístkoch”.)  If AVVM hasn’t figured out some way to control for this then either a) its polls do not deserved to be published anywhere or b) I will be able to win a significant share of Slovakia’s vote simply by registering a new party under the name “Aardvark Alliance”
  • The second explanation: Party chair Urbani “is among the most popular HZDS politicians” (“ponúkol tvrdenie, že Urbáni patril k populárnym politikom HZDS“).  This is in some ways even worse as it reveals a willingness to follow conventional wisdom rather than the hard data which is the only currency of pollsters (except of course that they accept money from parties to do polls).   In fact my I cannot find any evidence that Urbani has ever appeared among the lists of “most trusted” politicians conducted regularly by MVK, even though these sometimes contain as many as 30 names.  So much for AVVM.

Spot the Ambitious (but Still Problematic) Poll

In the same general category as AVVM but with important specific differences are the polls conducted by university students at Presov University.  These are fairly consistent with the other polls: just a bit high for Smer and SMK, a bit low for HZDS and SDKU and Most-Hid.  For three parties the Presov numbers are further from the norm: low but moving in the right direction for SaS, high and moving in the wrong direction for SNS and shockingly high for Unia.  For those who have forgotten, Unia is a merger of three economic and cultural liberal parties: Slobodne Forum (SF), which split from SDKU in the 2004, Civic Candidates (OK) which split from SDKU in 2008 (I think), and Liga -Civic Liberal Party (Liga-OLS) founded in 2008 by former officials of SDKU and ANO.  Merging three parties with extremely low preferences into a single party and then adopting an entirely new name seems in retrospect to have been poor tactics as since its formation Unia has regularly polled less than the previous totals for its component parties.  Except in the Presov University polls, as the graph below shows:

As with AVVM on AZEN, it is hard to take the Presov University numbers seriously on Unia since they are so far out of line even giving the party the benefit of the doubt on polls where its results are not reported.

It is hard to be as critical of this effort as it is of AVVM, first because it has not been used by a major newspaper without any effort to mention problems or discriminate among its strengths and weaknesses (though that is more the fault of Novy cas than AVVM itself), and second because from everything I can find out about it, it is a laudible educational effort that is open about its methodological limits, cites the geographical areas in which the poll-takers worked, and openly discusses its choice of question and the rationale for it.  I am still not sure that I understand how they actually went about the questioning or whether their decision to use party leader names rather than party names is a good way to measure preferences, but at least they are trying something new and explaining why they are trying it.  For that I give them great credit, even if I don’t feel like I can include their poll results in my overall average.

Czech Election Update: Link Roundup

Traveling again today so just a quick post to highlight the best blog posts I’ve seen on the Czech elections.  We have clearly entered an area where committed and educated amateurs can and will, for free, produce analysis of equal or better quality than what once would have cost lots of money, either to the consumer or to the newspaper/magazine that paid them.  (Yochai Benkler has some excellent analysis on the economics of social production and sharing.)

There are a few other articles in Czech that deal nicely with key questions:

These say it better than I could, so for once I’ll let somebody else’s words suffice.

Guest Blogger: Tim Haughton on Slovak Electoral Politics, Part I

More from wide-ranging Tim Haughton, who this time sacrificed dry feet to bring a full report of Tuesday’s political campaigning in Slovakia and showed his political acumen and intrepidity by going not to Bratislava, where everybody goes, but rather to Kosice.

How to Win Votes and Influence People – Some Reflections from Slovakia

Tim Haughton, University of Birmingham

It’s a question which excites and perplexes scholars and practioners alike: what kind of campaigning really works? How best can a political party spend its time and money to attract and hang on to the support of voters?

With the Czech vote behind us, I decide to head to the other half of the federation, where as all readers of this blog know, the Slovaks are gearing up for their elections. Opening the curtains of the sleeper carriage as the train pulls into Kosice station, I am greeted by the beaming smile of Vladimir Meciar, the three-time prime minister of Slovakia. His billboard promises ‘hovorit Pravdu, dat Pracu a urobit Poriadok’ [speak the truth, create jobs and ensure order].

The three Ps are capitalized, reminding me of Public Private Partnerships. Critics of Meciar’s time as prime minister (and indeed his party’s participation in the current government) might suggest that such PPP arrangements are about taking from the state to give to those near and dear to his party. A lucrative and successful partnership for some, but not for the coffers of the Slovak state. As readers of this blog know, Meciar’s People’s Party-Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (LS-HZDS), once Slovakia’s most successful electoral machine is in danger of falling below the 5% threshold. Perhaps to counter the widespread view that the party is a group of silver and grey-haired Meciar devotees, another poster at Kosice station depicts a large group of smiling twentysomethings, declaring that ‘And the young vote LS-HZDS’. Somehow I’m not convinced we will see a rush of first time voters racing to the polling stations to cast their votes for Meciar. The major challenge for Meciar’s party is to convince voters that it makes sense to support the party on 12 June. The party may still have brand recognition and one of the iconic figures in Slovak politics, but it looks and feels like a party well beyond its shelf-life which seems to have lost its raison d’etre.

The area around the station is full of billboards. Amongst those of the centre-right Slovak Democratic and Christian Union – Democratic Party (SDKU-DS) and the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) are several of the Slovak National Party (SNS). SNS’s pitch to voters is to pluck at xenophobic and nationalist heart strings. Whilst one of the billboards declares the party’s desire to ensure ‘that our borders remain our borders’ (a clear criticism of the big neighbour to the south), another wants to ensure ‘we don’t feed those who don’t want to work’ underneath a picture of a large, heavily tattooed Roma. Given Presov’s large Roma minority, this is a poster which sadly might be quite effective.

On arriving at the station I endulge in my usual ritual of buying a range of different newspapers. The leading Slovak paper, Sme, is running a story on the recent TV clash between Prime Minister Robert Fico and the head of the SDKU-DS electoral list, Iveta Radicova. It doesn’t make happy reading for the latter (the majority thought Fico had won), but I wonder how much influence these duels really have. Having watched both British and Czech ‘prime ministerial debates’ in recent weeks, I’m reminded that they can generate plenty of press coverage, can seem to have changed the political landscape, but ultimately – in the British case in particular – may have had little impact. In the Czech case if they had any impact it may have been to persuade some undecided voters not to vote for either Necas or Paroubek.

Elsewhere the papers are full of comments reflecting on the impact of the Czech results on the Slovak elections, most of which miss the key factors. For my money, three points are worth stressing. Firstly, electoral thresholds matter and can consign an evergreen (no not the greens, but KDU-CSL) to life outside parliament. The fact that nothing is sacred and that even long-standing parties with seemingly loyal support bases can fail, is a lesson some Slovak parties will need to take on board. Secondly, CSSD’s disappointing result and Paroubek’s departure must have had a sobering effect on Fico. The combative party leader was Fico’s closest international partner who enthusiastically backed Fico in the 2006 election. He has been more than just a political ally as Fico’s attendance at Paroubek’s wedding (in the role of a witness if memory serves correctly) highlights. Thirdly, it has given a filip to the centre-right. ‘If it possible for the assorted forces of the right to defeat what they like to label “lefist populism” in the Czech Republic, then why not here’ , they proclaim?

After checking into my Kosice hotel I head back to the station to take the train to Presov. After having bought my ticket to Presov and a ticket for the sleeper back to Prague, I notice on the back of the ticket to Presov an SNS advert replete with a picture of the old-new party leader Jan Slota and his one-time successor and now predecessor as party leader Anna Belousovova. Moreover, on the back of the ticket sleeve for my ticket and sleeper reservation is an advert for Bela Bugar’s Most-HID party. These both strike me as clever strategies on the part of the parties. Unlike other campaigning materials voters are given, a train ticket is not heading straight for the rubbish bin and perhaps will be looked at more than one during the journey. Smer-SD activists have also been at work. The slow train from Kosice to Presov may not be a glamourous place to campaign, but a party supporter has clearly been hard at work and has left campaign literature material on each of the little tables next to the windows.

The desire to visit Presov is dictated not by a desire to leave Kosice, but to attend an SDKU-DS political meeting where all the party’s stars and wannbe bigwigs are scheduled to attend. Thanks to the inclement weather the outdoor meeting doesn’t begin as planned at 16:00, nonetheless, campaigning doesn’t stop. Decked out in blue waterproofs young activists distribute party material and in a clever touch reminding Slovaks that their team will play in the World Cup starting in a few days time, they give out a red card like the one used by football referees reminding voters to give Fico a ‘red card’ at the election. It is also fascinating to observe how the different politicians behave. Many of the less well-known politicians use the opportunity to circulate and give the waiting crowd their own electoral material. Thanks to the open lists, the possibility of preference voting means that it is important for these candidates not just to encourage citizens to vote for the party, but they need to plug themselves as well, especially if they are well down on the party list. Whatever the merits of such big rallies for the parties as a whole, they are valuable opportunities for wannabe parliamentarians.

Once the meeting starts it follows a clear script designed to build-up to a climax, blending music and speeches. The best speech of the night is given by former PM Mikulas Dzurinda. If a party funding scandal hadn’t forced him to step down as leader of the party list, he would be the most likely alternative to Fico as PM. Dzurinda delivers his five minute speech with gusto, reminding the audience of his governments’ successes, berating Fico for his mistakes, pointing to the success of the centre-right in the Czech Republic and imploring the good citizens of Presov to get out and vote on 12 June.

Tony Blair’s press guru Alistair Campbell and the spinmeister supreme Peter Mandelson were always keen on making sure all the details are correct, acutely aware of the importance of image and symbols. The SDKU-DS leadership, however, have clearly not studied the New Labour handbook. Indeed, I’m surprised by the little slip-ups in SDKU-DS’s otherwise well-presented (and apart from the late start) slick rally. Two of the slips are made by the two bands providing the music. One plays the riff from Bowie and Queen’s ‘Under pressure’ as they warm up. Well, maybe only I noticed that, but during the performance one band plays Bryan Adams’ ‘the summer of 69’. I’m not sure how many of the audience were paying that much attention, but surely a song which describes 1969 as the ‘best days of my life’ isn’t really an appropriate one in the former Czechslovakia. It might have been the ‘best days of my life’ if one’s name was Gustav Husak, but post-68 Czechoslovakia under normalization wasn’t for most Slovaks.

The other attention to detail seemingly missed by the organizers was the exact location of the stand. Whilst it is opposite one of the busiest bus stops in the city and a Tesco supermarket, it is right in front of the town’s main theatre where they are showing a performance of ‘Marie Antoinette’. As I see former finance minister Ivan Miklos and social affairs minister Ludovit Kanik (who introduced the tough neo-liberal welfare reforms during the last SDKU-DS-led government) standing next to the stage all I can think of is the former French Queen’s infamous line to the masses of Paris ‘Let them eat cake’. Perhaps I am reading to much into these observations, but anyone with a good camera and video recorder could at least use the images to poke some fun at SDKU-DS.

By the time Iveta Radicova speaks it is already over two and a half hours since the event was supposed to start and the rain has been almost unceasing. The water has seeped through the fabric of my shoes and has made my feet all wet. After a few words from the woman who could be prime minister in a few weeks time, all of the party candidates assemble on stage for the grand finale> a rousing rendition of the campaign song ‘Modra je dobra’ (‘Blue is Good’). It’s a great song, originally recorded by the Czech band ‘Zluty pes’, but after so long standing in the rain with soaking socks all I think about is that maybe ‘Modra je dobra, ale mokra nie je’.

To Whom From Whom: Slovakia Electoral Shift Roundup

I had intended to post this tomorrow but SME just published an article on ebb and flow for the new parties SaS and Most-Hid based on a presentation by Olga Gyarfasova of IVO and so this is a good time to talk, if briefly, about where Slovakia’s voters are going and where they have come from.

First credit where it is due: thanks to Tim Haughton for finding and bringing to my attention an article in Pravda that presented data from an MVK about the stability of party electorates.  The graph made a decent point about the stability of party electorates (though I’ve argued above that these are not useful in predicting party results based on polls, making the statistic a rather academic one–not that there’s anything wrong with that) but also contained other data about where “non-stable” voters went that is in many ways more interesting because it helps to tell the story of where parties’ ebbs or flows are coming from.  That data, and the scale of the flows, was unfortunately buried in the graph and extremely hard to read.

So, with typical obsessiveness about graphics and a desire to avoid other work, I transformed this chart (more quickly than I thought I could) into something that told the story in a more complete way:

In this graph, I have roughly standardized the sizes of the images so that each pixel represents roughly the same number of voters.  The point is the same–KDH maintained the most loyalty, SNS the least–but from this (admittedly incomplete) data we begin to see the double flow that I have expected for some time: from former HZDS and SNS voters to Smer and from former Smer voters to SaS.  The graph only shows the data we have and so has lots of big residual categories (all other parties instead of individual parties and “undecided” instead of “will not vote” etc.).  It also fails to provide information on the flows to smaller parties or the share that flows from one party represent in the new electorate of the party to which it flows.

Thanks to Olga Gyarfasova, we now have some of that public for the two new parties, Most-Hid and SaS and here the pattern is again more or less what we would expect: SaS gains heavily from SDKU and new voters and disillusioned former voters; Most-Hid gains heavily from SMK-MKP.  There are a few surprises, however: SaS picks up a significant share of voters from Smer, and Most-Hid picks up voters from parties other than SMK-MKP (almost by definition “Slovak” parties) and from non-voters.

This is by no means the last word and all ebb and flow statistics need to pay closer attention to the degree to which flow is caused by people leaving and entering the electorate.  I hope to have more statistics on this in the near future and to improve the graphs above.  Until then, this will probably suffice.

Who With Whom: Slovakia Coalition Possibility Roundup

Just a quick post here–since as Slovakia’s election nears I want to move away from essays and toward updates.  Even as I lack the ability even to guess how parties will actually fare in the election, the news causes me to think about what happens after the votes are in and what kind of government will be formed.  As I’ve argued earlier, this depends heavily on which parties make it over the threshold, and since the margins are narrow, that is almost impossible to predict in any meaningful way.  And yet parties have begun to sort themselves in interesting ways.  Interesting here are a series of stories in which parties commit themselves to choosing some coalition partners and rejecting others.  We saw this in last week’s questions about whether KDH and other opposition parties would openly reject coalition with Smer (KDH did, except in the case of a grand coalition; Most-Hid did the same thing shortly thereafter) and whether the current right wing parties would reject coalition with SMK over the Hungarian citizenship law (Radicova of SDKU seemed to do this but then opened the door to withdrawing her rejection if SMK changes its position).  We also have the assistance in this regard of a helpful questionnaire by SME which most party leaders (except Fico) actually answered that asks, among other things, about acceptance of some coalition partners and about “certain rejection” of others.  The various links are here:

I also tag every article I find on the subject of coalition partners with the “coalitionpartners” tag in the social bookmark service “Delicious” and the results (as of this writing 86 articles) is available here: http://delicious.com/kdecay/pozorblog+coalitionpartners.

Together all these articles yield the following record of acceptances and exclusions, which covers nearly all of the 28 possible bilateral relationships among the 8 possible partners, with darker lines indicating stronger sentiments, black indicating acceptance and red indicating rejection.  I’ve separated the acceptance and rejection for the sake of clarity.

If we take these literally, we essentially move to a situation where just about the only viable possibilities are the current coalition and the current opposition.  In fact according to this, the only relationships across opposition-coalition lines that have not been formally excluded are these three:

And Smer in indicting SDKU and KDH for previously making a coalitions with MKP-SMK has all but excluded MKP-SMK as a coalition partner (some things are more damning to a coalition than a formal exclusion).  And in any case there is almost no circumstance in which any of these would help create a coalition except, perhaps, the unlikely Smer-SMK-HZDS “coalition from hell” (or as Ben Stanley puts it better than I ever could, “Sounds like a job for the Large Hadron Collider.”  So this evidence points toward either a continuation of the current coalition (hard to manage if one of the two Slovak national parties drops out) or its replacement by the opposition (hard to manage if one of the Hungarian national parties drops out)…

But, as a variety of sources have noted that exclusions, formal statements of exclusion do not mean that a coalition is impossible.  As I’ve discussed above, at my own peril I accepted HZDS’s Meciar statements at face value when he excluded coalition with Slota’s SNS.  As today’s Pravda headline nicely puts it: “Statements of Who-With-Whom need not be taken seriously.”  And as Michal Polak notes in a comment on a previous post,

In Slovak politics, talk is cheap, in my experience. One might blame Meciar, if one is so inclined, with his rich and frequently employed imagination, for introducing this aspect into Slovak politics; but whatever the case, I’d say that Slovak voters are pretty used to things tomorrow being different from what is being said today.

See the rest of Michal’s astute observations here, at the bottom of the page.  It’s nice to have such smart readers.

Czech Election Update: Time for the Bigger Picture

A third post on the Czech election. There is a lot to say. I will begin by not quite rejecting the strong temptation to direct criticism to Dnes for celebrating the record high number of women in the new Czech parliament by adorning the article with a drawing of a topless woman and then inviting its readers to vote for “Miss Parliament” based on electoral headshots (I feel compelled to include the link just to prove I’m not making this up, but please don’t go there). It is enough to say, perhaps, that this is sexist even by Central European standards .

Instead I will focus on the question of volatility. In yesterday’s post I plotted Czech volatility over time but did not have time to use the right methods or comparison set. Now that vacation is over, I can fill in the gaps.

First, I can provide references to the articles I cited: the two best recent works I know on volatility:

Because Powell and Tucker provide time series data, I will focus on theirs here, but Mainwaring et al handle the question beautifully as well (particularly their focus on “young” as opposed to strictly “new” parties). My first task was to take the Czech electoral data and use it to distinguish between volatility among existing parties (Mainwaring et al call this intra-system; Powell and Tucker call it Type B) and volatility created by parties entering and leaving the party system (Mainwaring et al call this extra-system; Powell and Tucker call it Type A). Using Powell and Tucker’s method (slightly different from my rough cut yesterday because it excludes parties with less than 2%) produces the following graph which decomposes the red line into its
From this it becomes clear that with the exception of 1992 (when extra-system volatility was huge because of the breakup of Civic Forum and seversl other parties) and 2006 (when extra-system volatility was basically absent), the Czech Republic has had both types of volatility in roughly equal levels.

These levels are low not only with regard to the first electoral period but also with regard to the region as a whole. To convey that point, I steal figures from Powell and Tucker’s 2009 analysis, circle the Czech Republic, and insert the 2010 data. For comparison’s sake, I do the same for Hungary (and in two weeks will do the same for Slovakia). The results are as follows, with the Czech Republic in blue and Hungary in green.

By comparison with the region as a whole, both the Czech Republic and Hungary have exhibited low levels of both types of volatility; indeed in most election years during this period, these two countries have been at or near the lowest overall. On specific kinds of volatility, both Hungary and the Czech Republic have only occasionally been above average on intra-system volatility and never (since 1992 in the Czech Republic) above average on extra-system volatility. In 2010, however, their levels of intra-system volatility rise above the regional average, but so did the previously extra-system volatility, pushing the overall levels from the near the bottom to slightly above the regional trendlines.

In addition to the quantitative resemblance, there are also other similarities.

  • First, both elections show a clear exhaustion with those in power that is clearly motivated by a general disillusionment with large segments of the political elite. Both the Czechs and the Hungarians had, for the most part, avoided this for some time, with large numbers of disillusioned voters holding their noses and voting for old parties anyway or switching to the other big party (accounting for the not insignificant levels of intra-system volatility). The higher levels of extra-system volatility in both countries suggests that these tendencies have diminished and that these two countries have moved closer to the Central European norm of disillusioned voters shifting to new parties.
  • Second, related to the above, both countries saw the emergence of a culturally liberal party attractive to younger, educated voters making extensive use of social networking software: LMP in Hungary, VV in the Czech Republic. (It seems to my uneducated eye that the Hungarian variant is economically more statist, but this seems relatively unimportant to the overall profile.) It is significant that a nearly identical party–SaS in Slovakia–looks set to take a similar share in Slovakia, and that similar parties have done well in the Baltics. There is here something new, not exactly a new party family (though in their cultural liberalism and anti-corruption emphases they share significant elements) and not exactly a new party type (though their methods and organization do not fit fully with any of the currently hypothesized models, even cartel and firm models), but with strong and intersecting elements of both. Nor is it unique to Central Europe alone but elements of it have emerged also in the West. Expect to hear more on this question in this blog. This is something that will need explanation.

Despite these similarities, it is important to emphasize that the election results in these two countries also differ in ways that are quite instructive:

  • First, in Hungary the intra-system volatility represents the evisceration of one major party at the hands of the other–MSZP dropped while Fidesz rose–while in the Czech Republic, all of the established parties lost support compared to the last election.
  • Second, although both countries saw the emergence of new parties, there is a very big difference between the center right TOP09 in the Czech Republic the far more radical right Jobbik in Hungary. This difference is important not only for the political content of the two parliaments (something we see already in the legislative output of the Hungarian parliament) but also for future volatility: a party with a clear programmatic message such as Jobbik may be able, despite its internal factionalization, to survive multiple election cycles whereas the more diffuse TOP09 may have a harder time of it (though because I have just predicted that it will turn out not to be true).
  • Third, there is a significant difference in the role of these new parties: Jobbik will be able to remain outside of government whereas TOP09 and perhaps VV will likely be part of government. Both positions have their risks: Jobbik may be able to avoid responsibility but will also be able to claim few accomplishments and has already had the softer parts of its agenda on national questions pulled from underneath it by the current government. TOP09 and (probably) VV will be able to implement parts of their agenda but will also become responsible for any resulting problems (even those they merely inherit) and will face problems when their new (and relatively inexperienced) cabinet ministers succumb to the same clientelistic temptations as their predecessors. It is interesting to me that VV has openly contemplated staying out of government, suggesting that it has learned the lesson of past Czech “new” parties and those elsewhere in the region. (As Tim Haughton and I have argued elsewhere: new anti-corruption party + government participation = death)

What happens in Hungary and the Czech Republic as the result of these elections will not, I think, have much impact on the broader world (and may not even have much impact on the quality of the daily lives of Hungarians and Czechs) but they are worth this degree of close scrutiny (and more) because what is going on there is indicative, I think, of significant transformations in the relationship between who people are (demographically), what they think (attitudinally) and who they vote for (politically). Demographic patterns and attitudinal patterns still exist but their relationships to political behavior have changed as perceptions of corruption have risen to the top of the list of concerns (and “endurance” becomes shorthand for “corruption”) and as political entrepreneurs take advantage of this change and of new organizational technologies to provide an ever changing menu of new parties (themselves organized primarily for short term gains). For awhile the Czech Republic and Hungary offered some evidence that the trend was not inevitable. With the most recent elections in these countries, it is more difficult to see any alternative.

Finally, from the broader perspective it is interesting that in Hungary and the Czech Republic the election has been regarded as a fundamental shift, a major change in the game of politics despite the fact that the degree of shift was, by regional standards, only about average. Perhaps earthquakes only seem major if you are not used to them, but they still shake buildings. Of course people and institutions figure out ways to survive even where earthquakes are a regular occurance, but their lives are different than they would be in areas with less seismic activity (money is spent differently, personal habits follow different patterns). I hope to spend a good portion of the next few years thinking about how political life is different when every election is an earthquake.

FOLLOW-UP ON PREVIOUS POSTS:

Ben Stanley commented via Facebook: “It’s great being a CEE specialist. Instead of accumulating common wisdoms, we get to throw them all away and make up new ones!”

Cas Mudde comented via Facebook, “Would be interesting to see the same for seats in parliament.”
Here it is, though it is actually rather uninteresting compared to the same calculations with votes.  It suggests, however, that one of the reasons that new parties do not survive is that they never really get started.  US, VV and TOP09 are the only new parties actually to have made it over the threshold since 1992, but this rather technically excludes the Green Party, SZ whose 2006 incarnation is difficult not to describe as a new party despite a certain degree of legal and organizational continuity with the one established shortly after the revolution of 1989.  It will also be interesting to see if, as Sean Hanley wonders, Suverenita manages to use its stronger-than-expected performance to chip away at CSSD in the next election cycle, thus enhancing (or if VV or TOP09 fare badly, maintaining) the red “2010” bar.