Dashboard News, February 2010: MVK shows Coalition Down

A new report from the polling firm MVK (the only company I know without a web address or logo) puts the current coalition down almost 5 points and the current opposition up by 6. Here’s the poll: http://spravy.pravda.sk/mvk-zostava-smer-hzds-a-sns-by-po-volbach-nezlozila-novu-vladu-pbp-/sk_domace.asp?c=A100309_094511_sk_domace_p12 . But does it fit what we know from other polls? More or less.

Coalition
As the dashboard shows, MVK’s numbers are within a plausible range nearly all parties.

Smer: MVK shows a nearly 5% drop between mid-January and late February which seems rather large. The other two polls we have (FOCUS and Polis) show the party with a slight recovery rather than a major drop during the same month, though MVK’s results did come late, however, and it’s possible that something happened (not clear what that would be from the news) to reduce Smer support in a way that isn’t recorded yet in the other polls.
SNS: MVK shows a smaller loss for SNS but in some ways a more significant one because as far as I can tell from my records it is the first major poll since August 2004 to show SNS below the threshold. Whether SNS is really that low is an open question (and one openly disputed by SNS which regards this poll as yet another election tactic by its opponents) but it is clear that every major poll has shown SNS down in recent months and the MVK poll certainly fits the trendline. Of course the party have low numbers because voters do not want to admit voting for it (this seems to have happened for HZDS during the 1990’s) but it could also have something to do with the party’s frequent scandals. Political commentators in Slovakia have argued that the party is immune to scandal because of its national message but that has struck me as rather condescending to nationalist voters. The fate of SNS will be–both for coalition development and for the overall tone of Slovakia’s politics–one of the most important questions in the coming election.
HZDS: MVK shows the party up a bit which is actually likely if SNS is really down. If one of these parties drops, the other is likely to be a minor beneficiary. It is fascinating, however, that the combined vote total for these parties is now down to around 10%-11%. Just two years ago the combined total averaged around 19%-20% in MVK polls.

Opposition
Most of these numbers, too, seem plausible though there is a bounce here that seems slightly unlikely:

SDKU: The poll shows this party up more than three points from last month which seems unlikely during a period of scandal, but last month was an exceptionally low month for SDKU in MVK and this merely returns the party to its levels for late 2009. Since the low poll came before the scandal and this more recent poll has come after (but before Radicova’s election), this would seem to offer some confirmatory evidence that the scandal did not hurt SDKU too badly, which makes some sense and gives some credit to Dzurinda for leaving the electoral list and more or less taking the scandal away with him.
KDH: The party’s 12.7 is the highest total (by a two point margin) that the party has received my 8 years of records of MVK polls. If SDKU were down this would make more sense to me, but it is hard to see this as anything other than a blip, even for a party that is doing better than it had in the past.
SaS: Is the same as last month suggesting that 1) the party has some staying power and 2) that the growth may be over. If this is SaS’s peak (and I have no way of knowing or thinking that it is) we now need to watch to see if the pre-electoral slide of new parties which hit ZRS, ANO, SOP and HZD will hit SaS and whethe it is enough. It is good for SaS that they are starting the slide from a relatively high point–at 9.2 they can lose nearly half and stay above the threshold–but not so good that there are 3 months in which to do it.
MKP-SMK and Most-Hid. Both are down slightly from last month’s MVK and Most-Hid is near the threshold of viability by these standards. I have no way of evaluating what the right level is; other polls have tended to put Most-Hid above SMK in recent months so MVK is different but not to be discounted for that reason. The real question is whether one of these two parties begins to fall short of 5% whether voters will flock to the other. The worst case scenario for Hungarians (short of both parties falling short of 5% which I still think is unlikely) is for one of these two parties to get nearly but not quite 5%. Right now the numbers make that a strong possibility. This means we have a 50%-50% chance of the best and worst-case scenarios (both in v. one weak party in) as opposed to a much stronger chance of a middle-of-the-road scenario (one marginally stronger party in, one weak party out).

Finally, a plea: Would MVK please include full results in its press releases as FOCUS and Median do. Perhaps it would help if journalists demanded them.

Slovakia’s politics in a nutshell

Everything you never wanted to know about politics in Slovakia and were therefore afraid to ask (lest I’d tell you). I’ve finally had a chance to annotate an absurdly long and detailed presentation on Slovakia’s politics which derived in large part from the exercises I’ve been conducting on this blog (and past efforts). The questions, some of which are rigorously answered in this presentation (and others of which I speed through hoping you’ll take my word for it):

What is politics in Slovakia about? What is the struggle
Where is the power?
What are the parties like? Their history, organization, voters, recent poll performance
What coalitions are possible after the elections? Which are most probable? Why?

Much of this is conjecture on my part, though I’ve tried to ground it as well as I could in data. As always, I crave comments lest I write out into the void.

There are two versions:

American Politics in a Nutshell

I am a comparativist by training and so it is not particularly surprising that I am fond of T. S. Eliot’s famous quatrain from Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

And I am therefore extremely grateful to Michal Kovacs of the Introduction to North America class at the Economics University of Bratislava for the chance to reverse the normal equation and talk about my own country using the tools that I usually use to talk about Slovakia. Thanks, too, to the students who paid close attention and asked excellent questions (but I’m still not telling whom I would vote for if I were a citizen of Slovakia). For those students who participated and for anyone else odd enough to care, a hasty, non-annotated (and therefore probably incomprehensible) .pdf of the talk is available here:

Slovak Economic University Presentation: American Politics in a Nutshell, 2010

Since this is in many regards just a highly abbreviated version of lectures in my Citizenship class, the truly foolhardy can find a more extensive treatment at http://waynehonorsgold.pbwiki.com (login: waynehonorsgold@yahoo.com, login: abercrombie)

In the news: Slovak Spectator article on parties (Warning: Self-promotion alert)

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

http://spectator.sme.sk/articles/view/37997/2/polls_suggest_centre_right_comeback.html

Dashboard News: Unhappy Median, January 2010

For once I’ll get the lead on the Slovak press and talk about a poll first, the results of which I have added to the Dashboard. Median published its January poll results today and they have their effects on the overall averages, pushing the MKP-SMK average below 5% for the first time in my dataset, while flattening out the sharp rises of Most-Hid and SaS and softening the drop of HZDS and SNS. We shall see how the press covers it (“CSAKY, BUGAR AND SULIK FALL SHORT!”) but in the context of other polls, its’ rather hard to accept. There are lots of ways to analyze this but for the sake of time and simplicity I’ll simply compare Median to the other three polls taken at approximately the same time (MVK, FOCUS, Polis). On the two biggest parties, Smer and SDKU, the Median result is right in line but on all the rest it stands out to a remarkable degree. Long-established Slovak parties (SNS, HZDS and KDH) score high in Median’s poll. Very high. Meanwhile newly established parties (and SMK) score low. Very low. In fact, for all six of these parties, the Median poll result is not only the outlier, but its addition more than doubles the range of poll values or more (x3 for HZDS, x4 for SAS and x6 for SNS). In other words Median results are more different from the nearest of the three other polls than any of those polls are from one another, as the graph below shows.

	Where Median polls high			Where Median polls low
	SNS	HZDS	KDH	MKP-SMK	Most-Hid	SaS
Median	9.6	9.3	11.3	–	–	–
Highest of other 3 polls	6.2	5.8	10	6.7	6.4	9.6
Lowest of other 3 polls	5.6	4.1	8.9	5.1	5.6	8.1
Median	–	–	–	3.3	4.3	2.7
Largest difference between other 3 polls	0.6	1.7	1.1	1.6	0.8	1.5
Difference between Median and nearest of other 3 polls	3.4	3.5	1.3	1.8	1.3	5.4

As I’ve discussed before, this may have a lot to do with Median’s unorthodox procedure of not providing a list of parties to choose from. But what to do with these results? I’m loathe to eliminate them as I suspect they capture some kind of political truth (some people when shown names of new parties in polls pick them but revert to long standing loyalties and remembered names in the voting booth) but they do ignore another (the inability of people to remember the name of the new party they’re interested in). And the firm’s past performance suggests that it’s take on the political truth does not much help us predict final results (http://www.pozorblog.com/?p=684). Median may thus act as a useful corrective but simply cannot be looked at in isolation.

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.

Pozorblog

Politics in Europe and Beyond

Category: public opinion