Nestabilita straníckeho systému Slovenskej republiky Prečítať

INSTABILITY OF THE SLOVAK PARTY SYSTEM

Michal Ondruška

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Politické vedy, Volume 25, Number 1/2022, pages 130-155

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24040/politickevedy.2022.25.1.130-155 

Recommended form for quotation of the article / Odporúčaná forma citácie článku:

ONDRUŠKA, M. 2022. Nestabilita straníckeho systému Slovenskej republiky. In Politické Vedy. Vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 130-155. ISSN 1335 – 2741. Available at: https://doi.org/10.24040/politickevedy.2022.25.1.130-155 

ABSTRACT

Many countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have been labelled as volatile for a long time. New political parties emerge and replace old ones; in a few years, new parties fade and are replaced by even newer ones. This phenomenon results in electoral volatility and high instability of political systems, which pose threat to fresh democracies in CEE. This topic attracted attention of many researchers —inland and foreign. Following paper analysed instability of party system of Slovakia from 1998 to 2016. To great extent, it built on previous knowledge, but tried to go deeper about this issue. It analysed questions of particular political parties and furthermore volatile voters, who tend to switch parties thorough elections. Paper came with interesting findings—apart from list of most unstable political parties, it analysed basic social and demographic variables of voters—such as gender, age, education, selfplacement on right-left scale and attitude to political power and elections. Even though further analysis is more than recommended, there are factors that are characteristic for volatile voter in Slovak electoral behaviour. As political competition changed with new parties in every electoral term, longitudinal analysis and comparative analysis with other post-communist electoral systems are required to support these results. Nevertheless, according to analysis results, all political parties which were present in National Council of Slovak Republic at the time of writing of the article were long-term unstable. Analysis did not yield any satisfactory results about general patterns of electoral volatility were not discovered; we still do not know what is typical characteristic of volatile voter, and whether she will switch political party or not.

Key words: Instability, Party System, Slovakia, Voter, Volatility