Smer at half-time UVVM caused a minor stir with this month’s poll which shows Smer support at near-record levels (46.7%, a level higher than any but that of early 2007′s 47.7%). The dominance of the party is remarkable. Meciar’s HZDS on only one occasion–the election of September 1994 and the first poll immediately following–received preferences [...]

On May 11 I had the rare pleasure of talking about Slovakia’s politics at the Cafe Roland in Bratislava’s main square with an audience that actually (unlike my students) had some choice about whether to attend. I am grateful to the audience for their questions and their tolerance for what was (in the end) too [...]

Overall Monthly Report FOCUS has just released its March and April numbers and as usual, not much has changed. Indeed the sheer absence of change makes me note (and regret) that I mentioned about an absence of change even in months with much bigger jumps. Though the various polls show some change (as this weekend’s [...]

UVVM Monthly Report A brief encounter between my computer and a falling hat-rack has led to a long hiatus in postings, but finally I have the processing capacity to post recent results. Not a lot of change, but enough to justify comment: This overall long-term graph of poll results for UVVM shows little change in [...]

Trends and Comparisons Monthly Report I offer here, as every month, a general and rather idiosyncratic look at poll numbers for Slovakia from rival political polling firms FOCUS and UVVM. (Toward that end, there will be a debate tonight–March 5 at 17:00–between Pavol Haulik of MVK–another of the big 3–and Ivan Dianiska from FOCUS at [...]

It is hard to tell the same story in an interesting way every month (and maybe this is why Slovak papers, which unlike me have competing demands and limited space, do not tell the story at all). First the numbers: Politický subjekt: december 2007 január 2008 február 2008 SMER- sociálna demokracia (SMER) 45,2 43,9 45,4 [...]

Trends and Comparisons Monthly Report Although I still do not have FOCUS data for January, it may be useful to post these individual-party graphs for the last 4 months of 2007. I will repost this as soon as I get the new data. In the charts below, Xs represent the firm UVVM, plusses represent FOCUS [...]

I offer the charts below to fill in gaps in previous reporting and to test the current blog setup. I hope to acquire data from FOCUS for January 2008 that will allow me to update this today. And UVVM data for February should already be available by next week. As a side note, all of [...]