Polling numbers for August are in:
http://spreadsheets0.google.com/ccc?key=pdhlCClsiyAPaeKoxMfAaXQ&hl=en.

This month we’ve got polling results from two sources: the monthly UVVM and, for a change, MVK, which only occasionally publishes results during non-campaign periods.  The UVVM shows almost no change from last month (which is normal); the MVK is fairly consistent with UVVM, showing somewhat lower support for Smer, SNS, HZDS and KDH and somewhat higher support for SDKU and SMK.  In this it bears somewhat more resemblance to past results from FOCUS, but unfortunately we don’t (yet) have FOCUS results for this month (and we may not since FOCUS often takes August off).

The overall picture is simple.  A traffic jam of 5 parties around the 10% mark with Smer cruising high above.  This is no different from last month.

The lack of change may be significant. It is, of course, important not to read too much into fluctuations (or absence thereof) from monthly polls (in the last year SMK’s support has fluctuated between 9% and nearly 12% despite an essentially fixed voting population).  The absence of a much change in August, however, is noteworthy since the leading government party, Smer, faced its first clear scandal during this period in the form of an employment ministry subsidy to a firm that formerly employed the current minister herself, despite the firm’s arrears in other payments to the social insurance system.  While not the kind of thing that brings down governments, the media coverage of the issue raised the coverage of clientelism–even Fico used the word in his denial.  Timing is important here, since news of the scandal emerged on August 4, near the end of MVK’s polling period, but at the middle of UVVM’s.  It may be that this kind of news actually takes a few days of accusation-trading to develop some legs and to affect the marginal voters, but it’s still interesting that even then the effect on Smer was 0.2 percentage points (though of course there could have been a greater drop that was disguised by a coincidental survey error in a positive direction).  Is the absence of a cliff-hanger itself a form of cliff-hanger?  Tune in in September.

I have just posted my archive of public opinion polling resources for Slovakia from 2002 to the present on a google spreadsheet:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pdhlCClsiyAPaeKoxMfAaXQ&gid=0

In an ideal world, the producers of Slovakia’s opinion data would themselves provide a service of this sort (and FOCUS has come close) but since this does not seem immediately forthcoming, it is easy for me to do it here.  As an aggregator, furthermore, I have the advantage of being able to compare multiple polls to one another, which individual providers may not be willing or able to do.

In addition to the general archive listed above, the archive has two pages that are designed for quick review:

A year-in-review page showing developments since the 2006 parliamentary election
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pdhlCClsiyAPaeKoxMfAaXQ&gid=2

An at-a-glance review of the current status and the most recent three months, including explicit comparisons of results from various polling firm.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pdhlCClsiyAPaeKoxMfAaXQ&gid=3

The spreadsheet contains graphs and tables tracking the following:

Share of party support:

Share of seats (if elections were held today):

Share of bloc support:

My hope is to update this spreadsheet on a monthly basis (or more frequently as polling data becomes available). 

The coming year on this blog promises to be a more active one. The reasons are all good in their own right:

• Google spreadsheets has finally added a graph function which permits the development of a useful on-line archive of Slovak public opinion resources.
• Fulbright has been generous enough to grant us six months in Bratislava. In return, I have promised to disseminate findings, speculations and impressions via this blog (among other places)
• A Wayne State “citizenship and technology” initiative has added a new area of focus to my work and for which this kind of page is essential.

Future posts will contain more on each of these.

If there are any readers left, I apologize to them for the
hiatus. Life has intervened and every
day away makes the return a bit harder (and so I learn the hard way lessons
that are to be had for free from anybody who does this with any regularity). But banalities get us nowhere. A subsequent post will address some public
opinion and polling related questions—what this blog is really for—but there
are a few others that I wanted to post in the meantime

 First, two items sent to me by long ago Martin Butora,
now dated by my delinquence, but still displaying Martin’s consistent eloquence:

• "Vikend pred cibulakom" op-ed piece
• "Je tu
  zatím hodně neznámých," an interview with Luboš Palata printed in Respekt

---

Second, a clever but
contentious pictoral joke. Its
interpretation depends not only on what readers think of Fico, but what they
think of Benedict XVI.

It is notable, by
the way, that as of the week before the election, there were surprisingly few
Fico jokes to be found online, especially compared to a significant number
about Dzurinda and an overwhelming number about Meciar. Either Fico is not funny or politicians in Slovakia only
become joke-worthy once in power. If the
latter—which I strongly suspect—then the coming months should bring some good
new material (and recycling of old jokes, one of them will inevitably have the
punchline, “God doesn’t think he’s Fico.” (For jokes from a previous era, see: http://www.la.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/stuff/jokes.htm).

---

Third, Fico himself
made a joke reference in a recent news conference, but in an unexpected way, and one that was uncharacteristically (and therefore probably unintentionally) self-deprecating: 

Fica kritizujú za Líbyu, ten sa
hnevá
Pravda, 24.2.2007
BRATISLAVA Fico tvrdí, ze na stretnutí s najvyssími líbyjskými
predstavitelmi bulharské sestricky podporil. Podla neho sa niektorí novinári na
Slovensku správajú ako rádio Jerevan, lebo "ja poviem, ze sa rozdávali
bicykle, a vy poviete, ze sa kradli autá". Vcera po kritike Fico uz o
zdravotníkoch hovoril ako o obvinených a nie o páchateloch.

In the form of the joke that I collected years ago, Radio Jerevan
is asked whether the government is giving away autos in Red Square in Moscow and
Radio Jerevan answers, "In principle, yes, only not Moscow but Leningrad, not
Red Square but the banks of the Neva, not autos but bikes, and they’re not
being given away but being stolen" Many
thanks to Sharon Fisher for finding the following, quite similar Slovak version:   

Otázka na radio Jerevan: "Je
pravda, že každý návštevník Cerveného námestia v
Moskve dostane auto?"
Odpoved: "V princípe áno. Avšak nejedná sa o Cervené námestie v Moskve,
ale o
námestie Gorkého v Kijeve. Tiež sa nejedná o autá, ale o bicykle. A nie sú
rozdávané, ale kradnuté."

This means not only that Fico has made the rather minor
mistake of switching bicycles and cars, but also that he has put himself in the
position of those (i.e. the Soviet state) who claim to be giving things away
and the reporters in the position of those who are actually telling the
unfortunate truth.

In lieu of an in-depth comment for the moment, I will post here an annotated version of the powerpoint that I presented at the Woodrow Wilson Center on Thursday.  It is a bit rough, as circumstances suggested an entirely new presentation rather than the one on "Voting for Thugs" that I had planned to give.  So without further ado (which will come later):

Kevin Deegan-Krause, Second Time As Farce: Slovakia’s 2006 Elections in Comparative Perspective, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC, 29 June 2006.
Download woodrow_wilson_center_presentation_revised.ppt

Before I get on to the big news, I must offer apologies for the delay in a variety of posting which I will try to do over the next few days. I had the good fortune this week of presenting my thoughts about the election outcome to a variety of audiences in the capital and to responding to some of the brightest thinkers on these questions, particularly Grigorij Meseznikov, president of the Institute for Public Affairs (www.ivo.sk). In fact our Wednesday roundtable at the National Endowment for Democracy was interrupted by the news of the HZDS-SNS-Smer coalition (just moments, unfortunately, after I gave moderate odds against it). For those who are interested, I attach Grisa’s incredibly thorough treatment of Slovakia’s politics (which he finished before a coalition formed) and my own response, annotated with yellow notes to help explain the more cryptic images and to put it the context of what we know now about the coalition. More on that coalition itself in a the next post, coming soon:

Grigorij Meseznikov,
Assessing Slovakia’s 2006 Parliamentary Elections: Domestic and Regional Implications, International Forum for Democratic Studies, National Endowment for Democracy, 28 June 2006.
Download meseznikov_presentation_zs_very_final.ppt

Kevin Deegan-Krause,
Realms of Uncertainty, Stability and Instability in Slovakia’s Politics: Comments on the Presentation of Grigorij Meseznikov,
International Forum for Democratic Studies, National Endowment for Democracy, 28 June 2006.
Download meseznikov_presentation_deegan_krause_revised_comments.ppt

There are, perhaps, more important stories to tell, but none has a clearer narrative arc:

A few final images before closing this morning.  Haulik in SME does a nice job of summarizing the shifts and expectations: http://evolby.sme.sk/clanok.asp?cl=2768740
One thing that he does not do, however, is to look at certain measures of underlying stability.  Along with many others, I have noted elsewhere that even though Slovakia exhibits considerable variability in electoral results (it has one of the highest average levels of volatility in the region)
there is actually a significant degree of continuity within electoral blocs.  Volatility for this election stands according to current figures at 32%, which is the second highest in Slovakia’s electoral history (thanks largely to the exclusion of KSS and ANO, the expansion of Smer and the swap between SNS and HZDS) but 6 percentage points lower than 2002. 

Volatility among parties of the current coalition was remarkably low, with KDH losing 1, SDKU picking up 3 and SMK unchanged.  The stability of vote share received by SDKU/KDH/ANO/SF is even more remarkable:  in 2002 the total for these parties (SF did not yet exist) was 31.4%; in 2006 it was 31.6%. SMK, too, received a share of votes virtually identical to that which it received in 2006.  The collapse of ANO (and the inability of SF to exceed the 5% threshold) is the main explanation, therefore, for the overall shfit in political fortunes away from the right. 

The major shifts came within other blocs.  The number of seats held by nationalist parties dropped by only one, from 36 to 35, but there was significant shift in the internal distribution from all 36 in the hands of HZDS in 2002 to 15 in that party’s hands in 2002 and an additional 20 in the hands of SNS.  This stability in seats was only possible, however, because of reconsolidation among nationalist parties that prevented a recurrance of 2002’s loss of nationalist votes to parties below the threshold.  (In 2002 Nationalists lost more than 10% of the total vote to parties that did not pass the 5% threshold).  The actual total of votes to explicitly nationalist parties dropped from 29.8% to 21.2% in 2006.

The left experienced a corresponding increase (though perhaps not a shift in the actual voters).  Its vote share rose from 22.9% in 2002 to 33.2% in 2006  and experienced a reallocation as well from a  2:1 split between Smer and KSS to the sole possession of Smer.  Because KSS failed to pass the 5% threshold, the left lost just under 3.9% of its vote total, but this did not differ dramatically from the 3.2% it lost in 2002 to SDA and SDL.

Finally, it is worth noting that although the final results differed substantially from opinion polls in a variety of ways (SDKU much higher, SNS, MKP and Smer slightly higher, HZDS and KSS lower), the overall bloc votes actually showed considerable consistency with recent polls.   For the left overall the result was exactly what polls predicted (but not in actual distribution among parties).  For the right the result was better than expected but only by about 2% while for the national parties, the result was about 2% worse.