Polls, Politics and Parties, Part 3: How predictive are polls in Slovakia?

Before launching into an extended discussion of public opinion in Slovakia, I thought it would pay to look at the quality of the tools we actually have. I approach this, however, as a non-specialist and look forward to input from others on how this compares to other countries and how better to measure what I am trying to get at.

I also undertake this knowing that whatever the results, 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.

Finally, I distinguish here between accuracy and predictiveness. I have little doubt, knowing the experts who do this work in Slovakia, that the polls get a read on Slovak opinion that is close to what people actually think (sometimes better, sometimes worse but usually close). That is not the same, however, as figuring out which of those people will actually come out to vote and how they will make up their minds in the voting booth itself. When I talk below about “error,” I talk about the difference between what polls say and how ballots are actually cast rather than to mistakes by pollsters. There may be a technical term for this that I don’t know and I’d be happy to learn it.

From the perspective of somebody who wants to know the result–or wants to make some money in the odds markets, the prediction value of polls for all elections in the sample (Slovakia’s parliament in 2002 and 2006, the European parliament in 2004 and 2009) is not particuarly encouraging. The difference between results and the average of final polls was 2.5 percentage points which is 36% of the value of the actual result for the parties in question. Even among major parties in higher turnout parliamentary elections of 2002 and 2006 the average poll got the average party result wrong by an absolute value of 2.1 percentage points or about 24% of the party’s actual result. The maximum error recorded was 5.4 percentage points (31%). While some polls occasionally came close on specific parties, the poll average never did better than 0.8 percentage points (4%).

Nor do the levels of error seem to be decreasing. In fact the levels and percentages of error are remarkably consistent from one election to the next when differentiated by the category of election.

Parliamentary Election	Year	Raw poll error	% poll error
Slovak	2002	2.0	24%
Slovak	2006	2.1	24%
Europarliament	2004	4.7	32%
Europarliament	2009	4.4	34%

This means that any guess about any party’s electoral results based on average public opinion polls, whether made in this blog or anywhere else is, at best likely to be 5% off in either direction and that the error will average (if the past is any guide, as it seems to be) around 24%. For a party exactly at the 5% threshold, a 24% error produces a range between 4.0 and 6.25. For a party with 30% support, that same average error produces a range between 28.0 and 43.75! For low-turnout European parliament elections the potential range is even wider. This resulting range is the combination of normal margins of survey error (a small part of the total) and a much larger component related to the likelihood of people to actually turn out to vote, regardless of their preferred parties.

The task, then, is to figure out whether there are any ways to figure out specific locations where the errors are likely to emerge and to try and correct for them. This means looking specifically at time periods, parties, and polling firms, something I will do in the next post.

Dashboard News: Telling the Wrong Story in the Slovak Press

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.

Unfortunately, that story is wrong in two significant ways.

First, the decline of SDKU started long before Smer attacks. As the data shows (http://www.la.wayne.edu/polisci/timeplot/skp_sdku_db.html) nearly every poll shows the party declining steadily from a peak in early-mid 2009.
Second, the decline of SDKU did not (yet) accelerate after Smer attacks. We only have two polls for the post attack period–Polis and Focus–and both show SDKU within 0.2 percentage points of its December levels. The appearance of a steep drop was created not by unusually low results for SDKU in the February FOCUS poll but rather by unusually high results for the party in the January poll. FOCUS can’t really use this as an explanation lest they undercut their own polling methodology (though some noise is simply part of the business), but as the red arrow in the graph below shows, January stands /way/ out. As the blue arrow shows, FOCUS’s December and February results (and November as well) stand in an extremely relatively narrow band. Of course the scandal may still hit home, but there is very little in the available data to suggest that it had any effect.

The story is right in one way, but even that is misleading.

There something of a reciprocal relationship between SaS and SDKU support…
SDKU’s decline is certainly related to the rise of SaS. Except for that one month, Focus has shown a steady decline for SDKU from around 16 to around 12. Polis has shown a decline from around 18 to around 14 (but interestingly did not show a decline for February when the scandals hit). MVK has shown a decline from around 15 to around 9 (from a poll that emerged /before/ the Dzurinda scandal). This is almost perfectly parallel with the rise of SaS. The scandal may contribute to an SDKU decline in the long run but it is one that was already occurring because of the emergence of a relatively plausible non-Dzurinda pro-market party. And of course the scandal may also indirectly contribute to an SDKU revival if it shifts the face of the party to somebody who is not connected to Dzurinda.

…But the tradeoff is not zero-sum. SaS is also finding other supporters. The most interesting thing about the SDKU-SaS relationship (along with KDH) is that support for these three “right” parties has actually seen a significant collective rise over recent months, as the highlighted portion of the graph shows. It would appear that SaS has helped to bring new voters into the mix and re-energize some disillusioned SDKU voters (and Figel’s new energy in KDH has helped a bit as well. So as long as all three parties remain above the threshold, this is a welcome step for Slovakia’s opposition parties. It is interesting that Slovakia’s right has only been able to attract above 25% when there has been a third right party other than KDH and SDKU (specifically ANO and later SF) (The same dynamic incidentally applies in the Czech Republic with the Christian Democrats, ODS and a non-ODS right wing party–ODA, then US, then SZ then TOP09).

Finally, the graphs that demonstrate the positive contribution of SaS to the Slovak “right” also demonstrates another story that has gone largely unreported in the Slovak press because it’s development has been more gradual:

The most significant shift has been the decline of ethnic Slovak national parties. The same graph here, smoothed using the LOESS technique (thanks to Charles Franklin of http://www.pollster.com for the advice and Jon Peltier of http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/ for the Excel add-in) shows this in high relief. Perhaps the smoothing is a bit too great for comfort here but the patterns are not different from those of the month-by month graph: until mid 2008 Slovakia experienced a fairly stable pattern of increase by the “left” and slight declines by the “right,” and the Slovak and Hungarian national blocs; in mid-2008 this began to change, first with sharper declines by the Slovak national parties followed by recovery by the Slovak right (likely thanks to Radicova in the spring and SaS in the fall) and recovery by the Hungarians (thanks to the emergence of Most-Hid, though if it fails to get into parliament or pushes SMK out it will prove to be a highly mixed blessing) and most recently by a reversal of the left as the party dropped from its early 2009 peak. I suspect that these trends are leveling out more than the graph would suspect but the smoothing does help to take out some of the monthly noise (see above) and help us figure out what’s going on. More on that in the coming ppp posts.

Politics, Polls and Parties, Part 2: Assessing the present and (badly) predicting the future

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 judgments in the process of analysis, so check back for the final conclusions–by late February.

In the meantime, here’s what I see in the current figures, enhanced by what I’ve learned elsewhere.

Category	Party	Current position	Long term level	Medium term	Short term trend	What will shape numbers in the next few months?
Dominant	Smer	40 ± 3	Gains from 2006 election	Decline from early 2009 peak	Flat	Aggressivity of campaign and national focus may help in some circles and hurt in others. At risk of scandals but good at damage control. Economic stabilization should help a bit.
Safe	SDKU	14 ± 3	Peaks and valleys but overall flat from 2009 election (party electoral performance usually better than polls)	Decline from peak in early 2009	Poll differences significant but seems like decline.	If Radicova is electoral leader and relatively untainted by scandal, may see some bounce at the expense of SaS (or may form electoral coalition).
Safe	KDH	10 ± 1	Flat until recently	Slight increase with coming of Figel	Slight decline from Figel peak but still higher than before	Most stable of all parties in Slovakia. Figel may have slight positive effect.
Near the line	SNS	7 ± 2	Peaked in 2008 and fell back below pre-2006 election levels	Erratic but with strong declining trend	Return to decline in recent polls	Election of Orban in Hungary will help but some voters may find Smer more palatable.
	HZDS	6 ± 1	Steady decline since 2006 (actually since 1992)	Recovered in mid-2009 from sharp fall	Return to slight decline	Opaque. Voters aging but loyal. Some inverse relationship with Smer and SNS. Will be close to the threshold–likely just above but hard to tell.
	MKP-SMK	5 ± 3	Slow decline beginning after 2006 election (maybe slightly before)	Decline prior to and (especially sharp after) emergence of Most-Hid	Return to stability just above threshold	Depends heavily on personality (advantage Most-Hid) and organization (advantage MKP-SMK). One should get in. Maybe both.
	Most-Hid	5 ± 3 (inverse to SMK)	New party	Not included in polls until 2009, beginning around 3% and growing rapidly	Stable just above threshold
	SaS	6 ± 4 (inverse to SDKU)	New party	Emerged at 3-5% and grew moderately after	Mixed results make size of short term rise unclear: may be significant or slight	Depends on decisions within SDKU and (unclear) effectivness of novel organizational strategies (worked well in Europarliament elections but untested in higher turnout contests)
Hard to imagine	SF	1 ± 1	Erratic but overall gradual decline from 2006 election	Significant decline from peaks in winter 2008 and spring 2009.	Slight further decline	Hurt by rise of SaS and would be hurt more by elevation of Radicova in SDKU; not helped by merger with voter-less Liga and OK
	KSS	2 ± 1	Erratic but overall gradual decline from 2006 election	Erratic peaks and valleys	Slight decline	Seems flat. Has not gained dissatisfied Smer voters.
	SZ	1 ± 1	Erratic	Gradual decline from peaks in summer 2009	Slight decline	Seemed to have a chance and now seems not. Might benefit should Smer begin to crumble but not in near term.
	HZD	1 ± 1	Flat	Decline from 2% levels in late 2008-early 2009	Flat or slight decline	Merging with Smer, soon to disappear.

Dashboard News: Polis polls, party death and party birth

While I will still make quasi-monthly blog posts about new polls, I have now integrated those results into the “dashboard” above and so when the changes are minor, I’ll simply refer to what can be found in the dashboard.

This week there are a few recent news of moderate interest (though with that build-up you’ve probably already stopped reading):

Polis polls confirm trends in other polls. Polis’s February poll came out today. With the end of UVVM polls, both Median and Polis have gotten more serious about publicizing monthly polling results. As with Median, there are reasons for not taking Polis too seriously in itself: with Median, the problem is with the question, which does not offer options to voters but requires them to fill in the answer, potentially hurting smaller and newer parties whose names voters might have forgotten; with Polis the problem is the sample, which unlike most other polls in Slovakia is phone based (on which more later). But while we cannot necessarily look to Polis’s results for an answer, we can profit from paying attention to its trends. And in this case Polis’s trends nicely echo those of most other surveys:
- drops for KDH and SDKU and increase for SaS;
- drops for SNS and HZDS and slight rise for Smer;
- stabilization for MKP-SMK and Most-Hid.

The reciprocal relationship among party votes continues to occur within the three blocs, with SaS and Smer the current beneficiaries.

Polis polls show the strong position of the current coalition. It is notable that even if the Polis results were likely predictors of the electoral results and even though they are about as strong as the current opposition could possibly expect–one of the current coalition parties out (HZDS) and all of the on-the-margin opposition parties in (SaS, MKP-SMK, Most-Hid)–the current coalition would still have a 78-72 majority, underlining the problems of creating a non-Smer coalition. 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. It has not been until early this year that I have given serious thought to the chance that SNS might fall short–it was doing quite well until last year but its current quite steep slide does not bode well for the party, and the party itself does not have much of an organization to fall back on in hard times. Still, the party has a leader (whose supporters apparently care relatively little about corruption and all manner of scandal) and an issue: Hungary. That issue is not going away, especially when Slovakia’s news media can today run headlines saying: “Orban thinks we have a complex.”
Parties die, Part 1. This week reported about a merger between Slobodne Forum, Liga, and Obcanski Kandidati. Since Liga has never gone anywhere and OK has not even shown up on polls, this doesn’t much help Slobodne Forum which is suffering itself from the rise of the other new party in its issue space, SaS. It also doesn’t mean much for Slovakia’s politics, but it ever so slightly thins the ranks.
Parties die, Part 2. Ivan Gasparovic’s HZD is merging with Smer. This, too, does not mean much since HZD had not exceeded 1% in polling averages since September but it also slightly simplifies the situation. It is also a bit ironic for me since in 2003 I interviewed Ivan Gasparovic and he told me, rather wearily (and seemingly without any thought of actual success), that he would probably have to run for president simply in order to bring some visibility to his party.
Parties are born. Living up to its established reputation as Slovakia’s main incubator of unsuccessful new parties (see HZD above, along with LU and the less unsuccessful DU and several others), HZDS has given birth to yet another formation: AZEN, the Alliance for a Europe of Nations, this one founded by Milan Urbani, another in a long line of HZDS’s second-in-visibility cast off from his own party. Given the lateness of the move and Urbani’s relatively low profile and limited appeal, it is unlikely that this party will get very far (it appears not to even have registered AZEN.sk before announcing its name). Given its interesting name, I am reminded of a Buddhist koan. AZEN is the sound of one voter voting.

Parties, Polls and Politics in Slovakia: Part 1 of a multi-part series.

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 of the quick and ephemeral issues in the next blog entry and then on to something more systematic.

It is my hope over the next several weeks to look at Slovakia’s party system in some detail as summary of the year past and preparation for the busy electoral season ahead (though the campaign’s been in full swing since Christmas). In particular I want to look at long term polling data for each of the major parties, looking at trends in support, the relationship of poll numbers to internal party politics and the relationship of polls to election results. I’ll be posting those as “Parties, Polls and Politics” and tagging them as “ppp” and they’ll serve as the basis of better analysis come election time.

News for those obsessed with public opinion in Slovakia

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 page. If it doesn’t work for you, leave a comment that lets me know what browser you are using (I.E. versions seem to have particular problems) and I’ll be glad to send you an updated PDF. I’ll still be inserting graphs in posts, but this is one way to get the data up quickly without spending time on analysis, and maybe that will prevent me from being so late in posting the data.

New publication: How much difference do parties really make?

To watch American television news coverage of political questions (something I can no longer bring myself to do) or even to read American newspapers (only slightly less painful) is to learn that leaders matter. Whether a policy succeeds or fails, whether a candidate wins or loses depends on tactical decisions, on turns of phrase, on the right color tie. To read some America scholarly work on the subject is to learn the opposite: economic conditions, cultural values and demographic trends shape outcomes so strongly that you can set up an accurate electoral model before you even know who the candidates are.

As usually happens (but not always) happens, the answer is usually somewhere in between. But where depends on a whole variety of circumstances. Toward that end I have been working with Zsolt Enyedi to think about how and when agency by parties and candidates can overcome the inertia of structures that include habit, cultural values and group identities. The main outcome of the first stage of our efforts is a still forthcoming issue of West European Politics and a Routledge edited volume on the structure of political competition in Western Europe that includes a long article that Zsolt and I wrote on the topic, but in advance of that volume the European Union Democracy Observatory has been kind enough to print a slightly earlier version as a Working Paper. The paper is available here where it appears alongside work by Marina Popescu and Gabor Toka, Peter Mair and Alexander Trechsel.

Below you can find other particulars. Zsolt and I are moving to the next step in this project and are very much interested in comments, questions, concerns and slashing criticism.

Title:	Agency and the Structure of Party Competition: Alignment, Stability and the Role of Political Elites
Authors:	DEEGAN-KRAUSE, Kevin ENYEDI, Zsolt
Keywords:	political parties cleavages structure agency public opinion
Issue Date:	2010
Series/Report no.:	EUI RSCAS 2010/09 EUDO – European Union Democracy Observatory
Abstract:	The study of cleavages focuses primarily on constraints imposed by socio-demographic factors. While scholars have not ignored the agency of political elites, such scholarship remains fragmented among sub-fields and lacks a coherent conceptual framework. This article explores both temporal stability and positional alignments linking vote choice with socio-demographic characteristics, values and group identity to distinguish among particular kinds of structural constraints. On the basis of those distinctions, it identifies various methods by which elites reshape structures, and it links those to a broader framework that allows more comprehensive research connecting political agents and structural constraints in the electoral realm.
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/1814/13133
ISSN:	1028-3625
Appears in Collections:	RSCAS Working Papers

Twenty Years Ago Today: Obituary for the Communist Party

Obituary for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, 29 December 2009

A quick entry today which I should have posted a month ago. Czechs and Slovaks had fun with the collapse of Communist Party and one of the best relics preserved for me by my students was this obituary (in the style of Eastern European obituaries pasted on the wall). Interestingly the parodist was astute enough to bury the “leading role” of the party rather than the party itself which, in the form of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, still attracts a stable 1/6 of the popular vote but today has a leading role only in preventing coalitions and attracting disgruntled voters.

(Rough English translation)

Who sets traps for others
Falls into them himself

With pain in our hearts we announce to everyone the sad news that forever from us departed is the leading role of the

Communist Party of Czechoslovakia

After 41 years of dissimulation, 29 December 1989

We part from our dearly departed “after free elections”
In 1990

In the name of the survivors

And others closely related

Milos Jakes
Miroslav Stepan
Alois Indra
Miroslav Zavadil
Vasil Bilak
Josef Lenart

(Original Czech-text form but without without diacritics)

Kdo jinemu jamu kopa
Sam do ni pada

S bolesti v srdci oznamujeme vsem smutnou zpravu, ze nas navzdy opustila nase vedouci uloha

KSC

Odesila po 41 letech disimulace 29. prosince 1989.

S nasi drahou zesnulou se rozloucime po svobodnych volbach
V roce 1990.

Jemenem pozustalych
Milos Jakes
Miroslav Stepan
Alois Indra
Miroslav Zavadil
Vasil Bilak
Josef Lenart

Twenty years ago today: At the feeding trough

At the Feeding Trough: Communist Party Headquarters of West Bohemia, November 1989

Twenty years (and about a month) ago, the students of the Vysoka Skola Strojni a Elektrotechnicka v Plzne (VSSE, the College of Machines and Electrotechnics in Plzen) participated in the demonstrations against Communist Party rule by creating a huge banner that read “U krmlecu” and affixing over the front door of the West Bohemian headquarters of the Communist Party on Moskevska Street in Plzen. As I understand it ( and I would appreciate any further insight) “U krmlecu” translates roughly as “At the feeding trough,” a criticism of the crudness and corruption of the party, phrased in reference to the Czech habit of naming pubs with “U” i.e. “at” something or other: “At the Three Fishermen” or “At the Golden Tiger.” This was a time of posters on walls–and from the picture it looks like the headquarters had already been a target–but the sheer scale and cleverness of this one is worth remembering. The best part of the story, as I remember having it told to me, is that in order to affix the banner the students enlisted the help of municipal workers in a lamp-post fixing truck who were happy to oblige.

This is far from the only example of courage and wit from 1989 but for me it is one of the most memorable, because I received the picture from my then-student Ales Vlk (a force of nature in his own right and expert on EU higher education policy) and because when I first arrived in Plzen in 1990 to teach English, this building was my first destination: in a supremely ironic turnaround that seemed entirely appropriate in a country where a dissident playwright had become president, the regional party headquarters had by then become the main administration building of the VSSE and its fifth and sixth floors (hammer and sickle stained glass window still intact) had been turned over to teachers of English, mostly young Americans and Canadians.

Two minor footnotes.

First, in a transformation that is perhaps just as appropriate, the storefront next to this building became the location of Plzen’s first McDonalds (the family of McDonald’s pioneer Ray Kroc came from the Plzen area and the Plzen McDonalds boasts a bronze bust of Kroc himself). It is also an entirely appropriate symbol of the Czech Republic’s changes that the former communist party headquarters and university headquarters has now reverted (in my understanding) to its original function: a bank. But, perhaps because history tends to repeat itself or because doing so would be just too expensive, or because they don’t even know it’s there, the new owners have yet to remove the 4 meter Red Communist party star which stood on the roof of the building in the 1980’s and is still visible in the most recent Google Maps image:
Star on the roof of the /former/ West Bohemian Communist Party HQ

Second, and relevant in almost no possible way, I need to relay my constant delight at the “U”/”At the” mode for naming bars. Of all of them in Prague, my favorite was a bar across from the restaurant U Zpěváčkůsouth of the National Theatre in Prague. It’s become the Kavarna Paleta now but it used to be a dive with good, cheap beer you could bring out side and drink while sitting on the sidewalk (no fancy chairs or tables). It was at this particular establishment that my friend John Gridley and I watched as a young guy holding a dachshund or beagle heaved it to his girlfriend so that he could go in and buy himself a beer. From then on it became, for us, the Dog-Toss Pub or, even better, U vyhozeneho psa.

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News and New Resources on Public Opinion in Slovakia

Update:
Because of formatting problems with certain versions of Internet Explorer , this page is now available as a .pdf file: 2009_12_30 Pozorblog Public Opinion.

I should begin with apologies for such a long hiatus and also with hearty congratuations to Monika Tódová of SME for writing one of the best articles on the process of public opinion polling in Slovakia: Prieskumy môžu politikov miast. It’s not very long but it finally addresses the problem of dueling headlines–“SaS/Most-Hid poised for success” v. “SaS/Most-Hid has no chance” (often in the same newspaper in the same week) and asks “How is it possible?” The answer lies in the ways that various pollsters survey the public, and it turns out (perhaps I should have known this) that FOCUS and MVK (and previously UVVM) offer a list of parties to choose from whereas Median gives no list. The latter method, of course, will tend to benefit those parties that are best known, while the former can give a boost to parties that are little known (and the process by which firms choose to add parties to their formal lists is fraught with difficulty.

The question now, is whether Todova’s article means a change in approach. Her article is the first instance I can remember outside of election campaigns when an article juxtaposes results from multiple pollsters. I can only hope that this will be the beginning of a trend even if (especially because) it might put this blog out of business. But I’m fairly secure that the time and space constraints of Slovakia’s papers will not let that happen and so there will be room for a blog obsessed with the minutiae of public opinion in Slovakia.

But just so that this blog does not immediately become obsolete, I want to share a new method I’m working on for displaying public opinion results. This is not quite ready for prime time, but using the Timeplot application developed as part of the astounding SIMILE project at MIT, it is possible to create dynamic charts that are fully modifiable and easily updated on the basis of simple text files. Of course that meant that I had to clean up my database, but now that that’s done, I should be able to present updated public opinion results with a minimum of effort (that’s the theory) and can even, theoretically, create a dashboard page on the blog itself for those who want to look at the numbers rather than read my analysis.

Below are examples of what is possible. I’m preparing a year end summary, so you’ll see these graphs again soon with some analysis attached.