Dashboard News: Polls again, for what it’s worth

It’s probably a bit early to care about polls again–it’s only been a month since the election, but where there’s polling data there’s usually misanalysis to go with it and one of the purposes of this blog is to address the problems.  The poll we have is FOCUS, which did fairly well in the recent election in producing poll numbers that resembled election results (though worse that some, including, most notably, Polis).  The big papers have “horse race” headlines today that Smer shows big gains while the coalition parties have fallen.  That’s only half true and it’s only slightly more than half relevant.  The problem is that the analysis is comparing the poll numbers to the recent election numbers when the election itself demonstrated that polls and elections are not exactly the same thing.  It is no more useful to compare post-election polls to actual results than it is to compare pre-election results because polls and election results do not measure the same thing (of course we try to do that comparison as best we can because we want to know who’s going to win, but it is still an approximation).  The true comparative test  is to compare the post-election polls with the pre-election polls.  Perhaps this is what the papers should have done because it shows an even bigger change, at least for Smer, which rises from below 30 to above 40 in the FOCUS poll numbers.  This is offset somewhat by a three point drop for HZDS–now way under the 5% threshold, a point it may never reach again in reputable polls–and a point-and-a-half drop for SNS, but whatever the calculation, it is a big jump for the current opposition.  Interestingly, looking at polls rather than election results for comparision, the new government actually sees a slight improvement as well: SDKU up two-and-a-half, Most-Hid up half-a-point, and SaS and KDH both stable.  The big losers here are the losers: HZDS and SMK, firmly below the 5% threshold, SDL back down under 2 points and no other party showing a significant result (including KSS which had stayed above 1% for all but one of the polls conducted between 2006 and 2010 but is above that line no more).  This is fairly normal in the post-election period and some of these parties may spring back (I see some possibility for a slight recovery in SMK if it doesn’t do anything ill-advised).   Since the SDKU-led coalition did not suffer in this poll, the Smer gain probably came from the supporters of smaller parties who were lured away in the final weeks of the election campaign or whose voters have finally given up hope.  Given Smer’s rapid recovery, it is tempting to note that the party’s voters appear to have stayed home at just the wrong time, but this may in fact be the nature of many of Smer’s voters, who are willing to settle for that party because there is none better within their ideological framework, but who are easily drawn either to other parties or to staying home on election day. Either way, it’s good to know that reportage on polling results in Slovakia continues to need a watchful eye.

The results are on the dashboard but here’s a quick overview

Slovakia Election Update: First post-election polls suggest big win for the opposition.


The polls are closed and we have poll numbers, delayed a bit by  storm-related power outages.  There will be a shorter lag than usual between the exit polls and the election results and the isolated nature of the delay may mess up the percentages in the previous post (or not.)

FOCUS did a telephone survey today and MVK appears to have done a traditional in-person exit poll.  The results are below.

If these are correct, then the results are a clear victory for the current opposition, and would, indeed, allow a 4 party rather than a 5 party  government from the current opposition (though 5 parties would give a much bigger margin of error along with a much bigger set of headaches).

Even if these numbers follow the norm of 2 point average error and the beneficiary is in each case the current coalition, the current coalition would not come near a majority, unless  one of the Hungarian parties falls below the threshold (and even then it would be a narrow thing)

Of course these are still polls, however recent they may be.   The next step is estimation from the preliminary results.  We only have 4% of precincts in at present, and they do give Smer a commanding lead, but this is actually pretty much what we would expect from the way that election results come in in Slovakia and when I extrapolate the lines, they actually correspond fairly closely with the exit polls.  Twenty minutes more and we should know.

FOCUS Seats MVK Seats
Smer 29.7 51 28 49
SDKU 18.1 31 15.8 28
SaS 11.6 20 12.4 22
KDH 9.1 16 9.9 17
SNS 6.3 10 5.7 10
HZDS 4.3 0 4.7 0
MKP-SMK 6.3 11 5.7 11
Most-Hid 6.7 11 8.2 14
SDL 2.9 0 3.0 0
AZEN
NS

Slovakia Dashboard News: At The Last Minute (or Catch a Falling Smer)

This is, I think, the last “dashboard” post for quite some time.  The next time you see me post on this kind of thing, it will be an “election” post, but for the moment we have the kind of unusual situation we usually only see just before elections: three major polls appearing on the same day.  Let me follow my usual pattern and deal with these party-by-party with a few words about coalition v. opposition.

Smer took a huge hit this month, with its lowest results in years: since May 2005 in FOCUS, since June 2006 in Polis, and October 2006 in MVK, an average drop of 4.5 (slightly more in FOCUS and Polis, somewhat less in MVK).  Why the drop should be so large is a bit of a mystery to me.  some journalists attribute it to party financing scandals, but I have a hard time believing that that news was particularly surprising or likely to pry voters away from the party.  I’m more inclined to think that it’s a bit of frustration by soft Smer supporters forced finally to think about making their choice (and it’s notable that SDL has risen significantly in the polls for which we have information, suggesting voters looking for the next best alternative, particularly those with more culturally liberal values).  It’s important to remember that in 2006 the final-week drop in Smer did not play out in the actual election and that the more accurate poll was one taken two weeks before the election, so some of this may be ephemeral.  But nobody in Smer can be happy today.  And for a party which has embodied the slogan “nothing succeeds like succcess,” some must be thinking of how to avoid failing like failure.   I reprint the graphic from the dashboard here only because it is so dramatic:

SNS gets a reprieve this month, probably thanks in part to the assistance of Hungary’s Fidesz, with a 1.5 point gain in FOCUS, a .7 point gain in Polis and no gain at all in MVK (which, however, showed a 1.2 point gain in its previous poll).  National issues may count more than clientelism for some voters and the SNS campaign on this question (which some see as quite effective) may have helped here.  It is hard to say whether the party will lose more from time in opposition (lost clientelist revenues, but time re-purify its image and play the outsider) or another stint in government (posts and money but ever more chances for people to find out how those were obtained).

HZDS also gets a small reprieve losing slightly in FOCUS but recovering to some degree in MVK and Polis, for an overall average of 5.2, far too close for anyone’s comfort.  This recovery may actually help it a bit as those who were on the fence for the party feel comfortable voting for it one last time, but its overall negative momentum and air of decline may be to hard to overcome.  This one is very tough to call

Overall the current coalition dropped three full points in June, to an overall average of 42.0, a remarkable drop for a coaltion that in less than two years ago polled 69.8.  Smer alone had poll averages of 41.0 as recently as January of this year.  The drop is so quick that it is hard to fully accept it and I suspect the overall election final will be a bit more, but we need not wait long now.

Polls of SDKU usually lack a clear monthly pattern and this month is no exception: stable at a high level in Polis, dropping from a middle level in FOCUS, rising from a low level in MVK.  The median stays around 14 where it has been for quite some time.  For SDKU it is especially hard to say whether poll numbers are related to final numbers as for the past 4 elections the party has outperformed its poll, though Martin Slosiarik and others note that the emergence of SaS may diminish that undercounting based on last minute shifts.

KDH has some of the same low-level chaos as SDKU.  No big trends like Smer or HZDS, but lots of movement and poll shifts ultimately adding up to 10% (as it has more or less for almost two decades).  This month the pattern is converging: Polis and MVK dropping from high levels to just over 10%; FOCUS rising from low levels to just under 10%.

SaS finally falls back into the earth’s gravitational pull this month, still rising but by a lower margin (.60) than in all but one month since October 2009.  Both FOCUS and MVK show it stabilizing at around 12 points and while Polis still shows a rise it is to that same 12 point level.  How much of this the party will sustain in the election is an open question: past new parties in Slovakia have lost in the voting booth, but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, TOPo9 and VV in the recent Czech election managed to mobilize voters.  Could this have something to do with their mastery of social networks and other technological turnout mechanisms?  Hard to say, but if it does, then SaS might manage the same trick.

It is interesting that despite the significant drop in the current coalition, the Slovak right did not see corresponding gains this month.  In fact it dropped slightly from 36.7 to 36.1 (suggesting that supporters of the current coalitions are going elsewhere, either from Smer back to HZDS and SNS or to “new” parties like SDL).  This probably is not bad news, as it suggests a certain solidity to the overall vote total of SDKU, KDH and SaS (and indeed the core vote of this population has been quite solid at about this level from one election to the next and its relative success in seats has been affected more by the distribution of the vote between parties over and under 5%.  This year despite lots of expectations to the contrary even a year ago, the right is relatively coherent and, thanks to the small/new party vacuum effect of SaS, should lose little to small parties and so has a good chance of getting seats in proportion to its base).

Both Hungarian parties continue to pass the threshold in all major polls, if only by a hair.  This continues to astound me: if you take two parties whose total support averages 10.6 for the last year and divide the 10.6 at random the chance of getting two parties above the 5% threshold is itself only about 5%, and yet these two parties continue to manage that 1 in 20 shot at not undercutting Hungarian parliamentary representation in exchange for a small chance at maximum gain (though this of course is not what the two party leaders themselves are thinking).  We will see very soon whether their luck will hold out.

Finally, I think it is necessary to say a word about SDL about which I have said nothing for the entire campaign, largely because until this month it averaged less than 2% and never exceeded more than 2.8%.  Suddenly, the party has jumped by a significant margin in every poll and stands at 3.8% and is staring closely at the 5% threshold.  Only two other non-parliamentary parties have exceeded even 3.3% in the past four years and both of them–SaS and Most-Hid–have a good chance of getting into parliament.  It is doubtful that SDL will be able to cross that remaining 1.2% in the final week (SPOZ in the Czech Republic could not manage it, though that’s not much of a guide here) and it is likely that its preferences reflect frustration that will translate into staying home or reluctant Smer voting, but its emergence is a sign of weakness that Smer does not wish to have revealed:

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.

Dashboard News: May FOCUS confirms April Trend, shows SNS at March levels

FOCUS has put out new numbers for early May (though we still only have results for the bigger parties since they appear now to have an agreement with TA3 that embargoes the full press release until later).  I do not have time to do a full post here but I’ve posted the graphs on the dashboard.  The results are not particularly surprising and we cannot say much until we see the other parties, but there are a few points worth mentioning:

  • First, with one exception these results are highly consistent with last month and they are generally consistent with the previous months of FOCUS polls, both in terms of levels and trends.  We do not yet know how these will translate into final results (their validity for predicting the outcome is uncertain) but they seem to be measuring the same thing consistently over time (their reliability appears to be high).
  • The one exception I mention above is SNS which leapt up by 2.3 points in the April poll and has now dropped by 2.5 to 6.1, the second lowest result for the party in a FOCUS poll since 2004.  I had a feeling that the April number was much too high, though the Fidesz victory in Hungary and the smaller rises in other polls offered reasons for thinking there could also be some substance to the increase.  Just as journalists attributed the rise to the Hungarian election, they are now attributing the fall to the SNS billboard scandal.  My impression is that neither of these had a major effect and that much, though not all, of the shift was an artifact of the poll itself.  In any case, this newest result is far closer to the overall trend and puts SNS quite close to the deadly 5% line.  I’m still inclined to think they will cross it, but I have less reason to believe that today than I did yesterday.
  • Otherwise, the trends continue:
    • Smer drops a point a month, a loss it can afford in electoral terms but perhaps not in terms of government formation
    • HZDS drops a third of point a month, a loss it cannot afford. The HZDS score for this month is the lowest in almost a year and since November 2009 the party has yet to see a month that did not bring stasis or decline.  Of course HZDS has recovered in the past, but this is its absolute last chance.  If HZDS cannot make it over the threshold in a month’s time, it is dead.  (Even if it does, I suspect it will be dead as an electoral organization by winter of this year)
    • SDKU stays remarkably stable around 14
    • SaS rises yet again, probably well above its final results but enough (as Pavol Haulik noted this week in HN) to bring it safely into parliament.   Where these voters are coming from is a question to me.  Some are coming from outside last election’s voting pool (especially new voters, I suspect) and some from the SDKU/KDH field (see below) but it does seem that some are coming from Smer, which seems improbable given the two parties’ economic positions but is not as strange as it might seem to the extent that some Smer support has always come from those who sought “clean” and “new.”
    • KDH falls slightly.  With SDKU staying stable, there does seem to be a slight reciprocal relationship between KDH and SaS.  This is not because the core voting bases are interchangeable–they are in fact quite different–but I think because KDH has often gained as the second choice of voters who shared SDKU’s positions but did not like SDKU.  Those voters now have another home in SaS.
    • The Hungarian parties continue to duel around 5.5% each.  In FOCUS polls the parties have varied, with Most-Hid overtaking SMK-MKP in March, then falling back, and then recovering to within .3.  Had one or the other of the Hungarian parties shown a commanding lead, I think we would have seen the other die or try to merge.  As it is they neither party (and neither party’s voters) has any motive to do so.  This is a high-risk game:  if it works, there will be more Hungarian representation in Slovakia’s parliament than ever before (and very probably in government as well); if it doesn’t, the representation will be at its lowest level since the early 1990’s.

There will be more to say on this when we see the full FOCUS numbers later this week.

UPDATE:  The full FOCUS numbers are in and do not show much new.  FOCUS is the only firm to look closely at smaller parties but these do not get much attention from voters: the KSS and the renewed SDL together and even the residual ZRS attract only 3%, less than KSS regularly attracted only a year ago, suggesting that the Smer is losing its support not to other “left” parties but to somewhere else.  It is also worth noting that despite considerable attention, and thought that it might compete with SNS, the radical anti-Roma party Our Slovakia (NS) attracts only 0.4%.  (Of course people may be unwilling to admit it but I tend to doubt that NS will do much better than this.)  It is also interesting to note that among the splinters of HZDS, Mikus’s New Democracy (ND) attracts 0.7% while Urbani’s AZEN, again despite a rather prominent media profile, did not receive a single preference from among the 1000 people surveyed!

Self-Promotion Theatre Presents: My interview on polls with the Slovak Spectator

Thanks to Michaela Stankova of the Slovak Spectator for asking good questions about changes in public opinion in Slovakia.  Her questions, in fact, serve as prompts for some of my future blog posts, but in the meantime you can read the interview here:

http://spectator.sme.sk/articles/view/38874/2/polls_consistently_show_coalition_slumping.html

Dashboard News [Update]: April MVK [and Polis] follows FOCUS on coalition drop and opposition rise.

[A quick note.  Rather than write a new post, I have simply updated Wednesday’s post with results from Polis.  This was easy to do because the Polis results were largely consistent with the others.  Unfortunately this doesn’t mean we have the answers to the key questions:  how do poll numbers translate into votes, and, in particular, what will happen with will the parties around the 5% threshold.  But if it weren’t for these there would be too little suspense.]

When two [three] different polls agree on shifts in most parties it is time to pay attention. The April poll for FOCUS came out last week and this week MVK [and Polis] revealed [their] own (always, to my regret and frustration, with less information than that provided by FOCUS). The movements in both of these polls correspond quite closely, even if they begin from different baselines: Smer, HZDS and KDH down, SaS up, others moving in different directions but not by much. The overall movement of coalition and opposition also agrees fairly closely, with the coalition dropping to some of its lowest levels since the coalition took office almost four years ago, though still likely ahead (despite headlines that “the opposition has caught up to Fico,” it is probably not that simple and it is the small details and narrow margins that will make the difference in what kinds of governments are viable after the election.

As always the numbers are on the Dashboard. The analysis is below:

Both MVK and FOCUS [and Polis] show an almost identical drop for Smer of about 2.5 points from February to April (and with FOCUS the March numbers are not far out of line with that trend). Because MVK begins with a lower baseline, it shows a lower result—35.1–which is in line with MVK’s overall lower result for Smer.  [Polis is between the two at  36.2].  Nevertheless the number is still striking because it is the lowest preference that Smer has received on an MVK poll since the just before the 2006 election (The FOCUS numbers from last week are low by FOCUS averages as well—the third lowest since 2007) [For Polis we do not have such a long baseline of results.].  Why so low? Probably a certain amount of fatigue, accumulation of scandals and problems and, I suspect, a bit of defection to SaS and, this month, to SNS.

FOCUS showed a big jump for SNS in April. MVK also shows a jump, though smaller in magnitude and from a smaller baseline [Polis shows no jump at all and a figure just at the threshold of viability.  SNS has usually polled low in Polis polls, however, so this needs to be taken with some caution]. [The FOCUS and MVK results] puts SNS more safely above the threshold in both of these major polls. How safe is anyone’s guess. It is hard to know how to think about this party’s chances. It’s past levels suggest that it has a decent level of residual support (if not strong organization) and I have been slightly surprised by its low but the years of scandal and extreme behavior by the party leader certainly have pushed it toward the low edge of viablility.

For HZDS the last two months show a drop in both FOCUS and MVK to just above the threshold of viability. [In the Polis poll, the party’s results are stable, but from an already quite low baseline, well below 4%.]  Of course it has been at that level on and off for the last year, and the overall trend has been quite consistently downward. The question is whether that downward trend will overcome the party’s fairly loyal voter base. This one will be close.  [News about Polis polls, whether or not they are accurate, certainly cannot help the party’s chances for persuading voters to choose it over another alternative].

The current coalition shows slightly different patterns in FOCUS and MVK: in MVK the pattern is one of clear decline from the mid-50’s to the mid-40’s.  In FOCUS polls, the drop is much smaller: from mid-50’s to the low 50’s [and Polis shows a result somewhere in-between, from low-50’s to mid-40’s] . It is still unlikely that the coalition seat would drop below 50% off this estimate, unless one of the two smaller coalition parties falls below the 5% threshold.

For SDKU the most recent polls of FOCUS and MVK show a more mixed pattern: in MVK, SDKU dropped a point from February to April but is two points up on its results from January. FOCUS shows the identical pattern but off by a month: in FOCUS polls SDKU dropped a point from March to April but up two points from February. [Polis actually shows SDKU up, suggesting the same sort of random fluctuation within a quite narrow range.] This kind of mapping is probably pointless however. What is clear is that SDKU is fluctuating quite a bit within its normal range and voters themselves are probably fluctuating as well. What is striking is that SDKU has lost so little in the face of a huge rise in SaS which should, in theory, compete for the same voters.

KDH shows almost the identical slow slide in both MVK and FOCUS, dropping about a point over the last two months (and slightly more from earlier polls) to a level around 9%. [Polis shows a slight drop but from a higher initial point.  For KDH it is the range that is unclear–the 9% of FOCUS, the 11% of MVK or the 13% of Polis–while the pattern of slight decline in the most recent months is common to all polls].  Like SDKU, KDH is probably seeing some effects from the rise of SaS: there was always a small cadre of voters who would opt for KDH as an alternative to SDKU. Now they have another alternative.

SaS shows virtually the same jump in both FOCUS and MVK [and only slightly smaller in Polis] and to virtually the same level—around 11.5% [and 9% in Polis, but SaS has tended to lag in Polis polls]. I suspect that some of these voters will, in the final equation, fall back to SDKU or KDH, but for the moment SaS has done well in exciting voters and does not seem to have made any major mistakes.

Hungarian parties. Here is really the only place where the [three] sets of major polls show differences in trend and even then it is only to place them in the same positions. The MVK poll in April is virtually identical to that of February, with MKP-SMK around 6% and Most-Hid around 5%, a result also reached by FOCUS.  [In the Polis poll the numbers for the two parties are stable as in MVK but the percentages are almost precisely are reversed, as in last month’s FOCUS poll, with Most-Hid a point ahead of MKP-SMK, with both ahead of the 5% threshold.]  For a party with weaker organizational basis and history, Most-Hid’s decline to near the threshold [in FOCUS and MVK polls] must be rather worrisome for the party’s leaders, but what will happen here, however, remains extremely difficult to assess.

The current opposition, particularly the right has done well lately. The parliamentary right has dropped somewhat, but not much, and the rise of SaS recently is more than double the combined losses of SDKU and KDH. In fact both FOCUS and MVK show an overall rise for the three parties combined by a significant amount: about [4 points in Polis in the last six months] 6 points in FOCUS and about 8 points in MVK. This was a fairly predictable outcome, I think, as the campaign and the emergence of new parties gave the right a stronger focus and pushed at the relatively soft electoral support for the current government (exemplified by Radicova’s ability to reach near parity with Gasparovic in 2009). The ability of these parties to form a government is still a longshot, but these numbers probably better reflect the overall composition of opinion in Slovakia’s society (keeping in mind that some of the SaS support, I suspect, is not from the ideologically “right” but from dissatisfied “new party” support which had previously gone to Smer.

But the threshold will still be the key determinant.

Dashboard News: April MVK follows FOCUS on coalition drop and opposition rise.

When two different polls agree on shifts in most parties it is time to pay attention.  The April poll for FOCUS came out last week and this week MVK revealed its own (always, to my regret and frustration, with less information than that provided by FOCUS).  The movements in both of these polls correspond quite closely, even if they begin from different baselines: Smer, HZDS and KDH down, SaS up, others moving in different directions but not by much.  The overall movement of coalition and opposition also agrees fairly closely, with the coalition dropping to some of its lowest levels since the coalition took office almost four years ago, though still likely ahead (despite headlines that “the opposition has caught up to Fico,” it is probably not that simple and it is the small details and narrow margins that will make the difference in what kinds of governments are viable after the election.

As always the numbers are on the Dashboard.  The analysis is below:

Both MVK and FOCUS show an almost identical drop for Smer of about 2.5 points from February to April (and with FOCUS the March numbers are not far out of line with that trend). Because MVK begins with a lower baseline, it shows a lower result—35.1–which is in line with MVK’s overall lower result for Smer. Nevertheless the number is still striking because it is the lowest preference that Smer has received on an MVK poll since the just before the 2006 election (The FOCUS numbers from last week are low by FOCUS averages as well—the third lowest since 2007). Why so low? Probably a certain amount of fatigue, accumulation of scandals and problems and, I suspect, a bit of defection to SaS and, this month, to SNS.

FOCUS showed a big jump for SNS in April. MVK also shows a jump, though smaller in magnitude and from a smaller baseline. Still, it puts SNS more safely above the threshold in both of these major polls. How safe is anyone’s guess. It is hard to know how to think about this party’s chances. It’s past levels suggest that it has a decent level of residual support (if not strong organization) and I have been slightly surprised by its low but the years of scandal and extreme behavior by the party leader certainly have pushed it toward the low edge of viablility.

For HZDS the last two months show a drop in both FOCUS and MVK to just above the threshold of viability. Of course it has been at that level on and off for the last year, and the overall trend has been quite consistently downward. The question is whether that downward trend will overcome the party’s fairly loyal voter base. This one will be close.

The current coalition shows slightly different patterns in FOCUS and MVK: in MVK the pattern is one of clear decline from the mid-50’s to the mid-40’s. In FOCUS polls, the drop is much smaller: from mid-50’s to the low 50’s. It is still unlikely that the coalition seat would drop below 50% off this estimate, unless one of the two smaller coalition parties falls below the 5% threshold.

For SDKU the most recent polls of FOCUS and MVK show a more mixed pattern: in MVK, SDKU dropped a point from February to April but is two points up on its results from January. FOCUS shows the identical pattern but off by a month: in FOCUS polls SDKU dropped a point from March to April but up two points from February. This kind of mapping is probably pointless however. What is clear is that SDKU is fluctuating quite a bit within its normal range and voters themselves are probably fluctuating as well. What is striking is that SDKU has lost so little in the face of a huge rise in SaS which should, in theory, compete for the same voters.

KDH shows almost the identical slow slide in both MVK and FOCUS, dropping about a point over the last two months (and slightly more from earlier polls) to a level around 9%. Like SDKU, KDH is probably seeing some effects from the rise of SaS: there was always a small cadre of voters who would opt for KDH as an alternative to SDKU. Now they have another alternative.

SaS shows virtually the same jump in both FOCUS and MVK and to virtually the same level—around 11.5%. I suspect that some of these voters will, in the final equation, fall back to SDKU or KDH, but for the moment SaS has done well in exciting voters and does not seem to have made any major mistakes.

Hungarian parties. Here is really the only place where the two sets of major polls show differences in trend and even then it is only to place them in the same positions. The MVK poll in April is virtually identical to that of February, with MKP-SMK around 6% and Most-Hid around 5%, a result also reached by FOCUS. For a party with weaker organizational basis and history, Most-Hid’s decline to near the threshold must be rather worrisome for the party’s leaders, but what will happen here, however, remains extremely difficult to assess.

The current opposition, particularly the right has done well lately. The parliamentary right has dropped somewhat, but not much, and the rise of SaS recently is more than double the combined losses of SDKU and KDH. In fact both FOCUS and MVK show an overall rise for the three parties combined by a significant amount: about 6 points in the last six months in FOCUS and about 8 points in MVK. This was a fairly predictable outcome, I think, as the campaign and the emergence of new parties gave the right a stronger focus and pushed at the relatively soft electoral support for the current government (exemplified by Radicova’s ability to reach near parity with Gasparovic in 2009). The ability of these parties to form a government is still a longshot, but these numbers probably better reflect the overall composition of opinion in Slovakia’s society (keeping in mind that some of the SaS support, I suspect, is not from the ideologically “right” but from dissatisfied “new party” support which had previously gone to Smer.

But the threshold will still be the key determinant.

Dashboard News: Polls disagree, parties shift (maybe), but blocs stay stable

The blog has been slow lately as I’ve finished up some local and international projects and concluded the semester.  And because Slovak poll numbers tend to be a mid-month phenomenon.  I have lots that I hope to talk about in the coming week but for now I want to get a jump on the numbers that appeared yesterday from Median and today from FOCUS.

While the two polls show a bunch of individual shifts in various parties, the limits of the polls themselves make these suspect to closer scrutiny.  What emerges is some uncertainty about specifics but a fairly clear general picture of stability (one that does not lend much insight into the crucial question of performance of those parties near the edge of viability (the two Slovak National parties HZDS and SNS and the two Hungarian National parties MKP-SMK and Most-Hid) which will affect coalition performance in a major way.

The overall results can be found on the dashboard.  Analysis is below.

Smer. A slight drop in FOCUS, stable in Median.  The difference between the two is about 7 points, one of the wider gaps between FOCUS and Median on Smer, but not the widest.  Median’s method of asking people to name parties should tend to boost the reported fortunes of well known parties (such as Smer).  No great changes or surprises here.

HZDS: Stable in both Median and FOCUS and at what are near-record lows in both polls.  It is interesting (but difficult to parse) that after HZDS’s huge drop in the Median polls between January and February, that the two are relatively close, between 5% and 6%.  HZDS thus stands at the threshold of viability for both a pollster that regularly poll about average for HZDS (FOCUS) and one that has recently polled high for HZDS (Median).

SNS: SME calls SNS’s rise in this month’s FOCUS poll a “second wind.”  Is this right?  Maybe, but not certainly.  This may reflect the recent Hungarian election results, but those have been predictable for so long (a colleague of mine wrote a paper in March in which he put the Orban victory in Hungary in past tense before it had even happened) that I wonder how much that really influences SNS numbers.  but I have doubts about whether this reflects a broader rise in preferences or simply a polling artifact.  Of the major existing parties, SNS poll results have a slightly greater propensity to jump around than do those of other parties.  The party saw a temporary drop of this same magnitude for one month late in 2009 and this may be a similar occurrence (in reverse) or a genuine Fidesz induced recovery.  Polis polls (which should be coming soon) may help us to tell if it is statistical noise.  Next month’s poll will tell us if it is a temporary blip.  It is worth noting, however that an article that says SNS has a second wind blows some of that wind itself.

The current coalition: Extremely stable, the even as individual party results have jumped around in both polls.  In Median polls coalition support dropped by about one twentieth over the last 3 months, from 60% to 57% while in FOCUS polls its support has stayed remarkably consistent: 50.6% in February, 50.1% in March and 50.8% in April (down from the mid-50’s in late 2009).  Losses by any one of these parties seem, for the present, to offset gains by others.

SDKU: Stable, though it is hard to know exactly what that means.  SDKU has gone through big changes lately both in its internal structure (Dzurinda to Miklos v. Radicova) and external environment (the rise of SaS and Figel in KDH) and has jumped around quite a bit.  That said, on this party FOCUS and Median have produced relatively similar results for this party, and continue to do so, putting relatively stable around 13%.  Read one way, Radicova’s arrival has not helped the party; read another way, the party has not lost much despite the emergence of a significant rival (or two) on its own territory.

KDH: Unclear.  FOCUS shows a small drop for KDH while Median shows a big jump.  Hard to parse this as well.  In February and March FOCUS was the outlier on KDH showing lower support smaller gains than any of the other three major polls.  For now FOCUS is all we have for April so it’s hard to say whether to take its numbers seriously.

SaS: No drop yet.  Every poll shows the same trend for SaS: an almost uninterrupted rise during 2009 with a brief pause or slight reversal in February/March 2010.  FOCUS new poll shows renewed growth in April and we do not have any other polls that confirm or deny that movement.  Median shows the same trend, though it’s much lower numbers for SaS are undoubtedly the result of its different survey question (which does not specify any options a priori).  In this case the SaS mechanism may offer a useful corrective for the numbers found by other parties (with lack-of-awareness of a party substituting here for lack-of-commitment to that party).  It is hard to believe that SaS will sustain results over 11% in the final tally if ANO and SOP did not, but this result does seem to put it out of immediate danger of falling below the threshold (thus reducing the number of parties in danger to “only” four.

Most-Hid and MKP-SMK: Stable but polls offer no insight on the key “threshold” question. The Hungarian parties results remain the most difficult to judge, at least with regard to the most important question of whether either party (or both together) will pass the 5% threshold.  FOCUS puts both parties right on the line (MKP stable over 3 months, Most-Hid dropping from a higher position).  I have argued that one of the two should pass the threshold but it is not clear which one.  The current stasis (with both above the threshold) makes it unlikely that one party will be seen as “running away with it” and lower the possibility of something like an 8% v. 3% split (not ideal, sacrificing maximum gain for maximum loss) while maximizing the possibility of either something like a 5.9% v. 5.1% split (a best case scenario) or something like 6.1% v. 4.9% (a worst case scenario).  Median, I think, simply needs to be ignored on Hungarian parties.  There is no basis that I can think of for trusting a result that shows the total Hungarian electorate at less than 8%; Median puts it at 6.2%.

The current opposition: Steady increase.  Averaging parties into blocs shows a lower overall shift (suggesting that volatility is within rather than between blocs).  Median shows very little change for the current opposition over time, and only 0.3% gain in the last month.  FOCUS likewise shows only a 1% gain in the most recent month though the longer term numbers suggest a rise of about one tenth since late 2009, likely consisting of new voters attracted by SaS and Most-Hid.