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 [...]

I’ve recently prepared some thoughts on foreign policy of populist and extremist parties in postcommunist Europe and have uploaded an annotated presentation–see Populist foreign policy annotated.ppt or Populist foreign policy annotated.pdf–for those who are interested. It contains some thoughts on definitions of extremism and populism, makes reference to the excellent expert surveys by Hooghe and [...]

Interesting post today from Richard Sulik, founder of Sloboda a Solidarita (trendily-colored logo is at left, found not on a party website but on a Facebook page), who responds to the charge from SDKU that SaS hurt the right by causing voters to “waste” votes on a party that did not make it over the [...]

I have written a bit about new parties and particularly those parties for which being “new” is a feature (as Allan Sikk calls it, “the project of newness”)–and will be writing a lot more about this–but I never imagined that a single party’s advertising campaign could capture almost all of the basic issues involved with [...]

I was intrigued to see stories about a recent Fico appearance, particularly one in HNOnline entitled, “Fico: There is an artificially created impression that every politician is a thief.” How did that impression get created?  I have a partial theory: The points Fico raises in the article are not at all inappropriate:  Politics is hard [...]

Dissatisfaction with Slovakia’s current roster of pro-market, cultural liberal parties has produced yet another entrant: Liga-Civic Liberal Party: http://www.liga-ols.sk.  Liga-OLS enters an crowded field, one already occupied by SDKU as well as the smaller, non-parliamentary Alliance of the New Citizen (ANO) and Slobodne Forum (SF).     Liga’s proto-platform places it squarely in the same [...]

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Trends and comparisons monthly report BODY { FONT-FAMILY:Verdana; FONT-SIZE:10pt } P { FONT-FAMILY:Verdana; FONT-SIZE:10pt } DIV { FONT-FAMILY:Verdana; FONT-SIZE:10pt } TD { FONT-FAMILY:Verdana; FONT-SIZE:10 FOCUS numbers for August are in and I include them below.  In general the monthly numbers are either unsurprising and when they /are/ surprising it is tempting to dismiss them as [...]

A brief note here to comment on one specific element of Robert Fico’s press conference remarks here regarding contracts received by those close to Smer: “the government coalition will not allow discrimination against two-thirds of the population only because they sympathize with the government party.” (see below in red). This is notable for several reasons, [...]

Slovak Academy of Sciences, Sociological Institute, 25.06.2008 Many thanks to Zuzana Kusa and the researchers at the Sociological Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences for hosting a lively discussion on populism, with the best and most challenging questions yet. Dakujem. Tu je powerpoint (po slovensky): http://www.la.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/populism/SU SAV populism 2008.ppt I am delighted by the [...]