Another year, another election.  This time a joint work by Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause reviewing Slovakia’s most recent election and what it means (even for people who can’t find Slovakia on a map). Tim Haughton (not pictured here) is Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies & Senior [...]

Now that the dust has settled and the world has moved on to other things, it is time for a post-mortem of what happened.  (I wish, in retrospect, that time had permitted me to publish my pre-mortem which, because it revealed certain electoral incentives for SaS to hold its ground and not swerve in this [...]

The people of Slovakia are so accustomed to being ignored or misidentified that they have made it a source of national pride (as the a recent Slovak beer ad attests), but suddenly Slovakia is on the cover of every newspaper in Europe (and even in the United States) because it alone of the 17 Euro [...]

Those who would criticize American art as sterile and commercialized have obviously not familiarized themselves with the art of Congressional district boundary drawing which, like certain kinds of locust, flourishes once every decade (sometimes more often in Texas), feeding on census data and political desire.  And this year local Michigan artists have done their state [...]

I returned from election observation in Belarus several days ago (via Tokyo, of all places, thanks to snow in Frankfurt) and wanted to share a few observations that struck me quite forcefully during the election period.  First, however, I should clarify that this is not a comment about the overall conduct of the election in [...]

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 [...]

I’m happy to welcome yet another guest blogger:  Richard Swales, who describes himself as follows: Richard Swales is from England, but lives in Kosice where he is married and runs Jazykova skola Start (www.jazykova.sk), a school for Slovaks who want to learn English. Richard and I have never met in person but he been such a consistent source of [...]

Note: Thanks to The Monkey Cage for allowing me to reprint the posting below.  I’ve added several graphs that might help to clarify the narrative. One month after its June 12 elections, Slovakia has a new government. On Friday of last week Iveta Radicova of the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union became the prime minister [...]

Apologies to readers for the long absence thanks, for a change, to a real vacation.  As nice as it was to go away it’s nice to be back.  And there is no nicer way to return to blogging life than to do so with a review of the 2010 Slovak Elections in The Monkey Cage, [...]

I have been traveling and working on other projects and so have not had time to post a coherent post-election review, and I may not have time to do that until tomorrow, so in the meantime I will attach here a record of interview I did with the ever-capable Michaela Stankova of the Slovak Spectator.  [...]