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 [...]

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 [...]

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.  [...]

With all but 2 precincts reporting, the gap has widened slightly to give an additional seat to SDKU at the expense of Smer, so a potential SDKU-led coalition would have an 8 seat (i.e. 4 defection) margin.  Other governments have worked with less. I’m off to bed unless the final precincts come in in the [...]

It may be possible finally to call the final parliamentary distribution.  Smer has been dropping but at a relatively slow level and with the most recent result it has dropped to 35.4 which by my calculation means 63 seats in parliament.  Add this to SNS’s 9 (about the fewest it is possible to get) and [...]

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 [...]

In a few hours (22:00 CET, 4pm  ET) the papers and TV stations will fall all over themselves to present early results based on exit polls (unless they ignored the lesson that STV learned the hard way in 2006: even the most elaborate large-sample pre-election survey is not the same as an exit poll).  About [...]

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 [...]

I love polling results and I am always surprised and unhappy when they are abused.  Recent articles in SME and Pravda put needless stress on these results by, on the one hand, treating them as unique and absolute indicators of a party’s success or failure (at least until the next one comes out) and, on [...]

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.  [...]