New paper out — The Volebny Kompas Datasets on Slovak Voter and Party Positions

After a lot of hard work, it’s finally out! My amazing colleagues Kamila Borsekova, Lorenzo Cicchi, Vladimír Müller, Robert Vancel, Patrícia Šimková and Kevin Deegan-Krause and I have just published our latest paper in Scientific Data. It introduces an open-access dataset from the 2023 Slovak Parliamentary Elections, generated by the Volebný Kompas (Election Compass) voting advice application that we implemented last year together with our friends at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies within our #BRRIDGE Horizon project that we lead. The dataset is one of only a few fully open-access datasets globally that come from a national elections VAA.

The data includes over 134,000 voter responses, collected over 26 days leading up to and including the 2023 snap Slovak Parliamentary Elections, along with a detailed record of 429 policy positions from 11 political parties. Both datasets offer a comprehensive look at voter and party positions across 39 key political, economic, and societal issues, as well as many additional data.

To make things even easier to explore, we’ve run some analyses and provided the full R code, along with loads of additional resources (e.g., datasets for comparative purposes, census re-weighting, etc.). If you’re interested, definitely check it out—we truly believe this can provide insights not only within the Slovak electoral context but also into broader contemporary European political and social trends.

Also a massive thanks for all the people who helped along the way Juraj Konik, Daniel Kerekes, Karolina Piliarova, and of course thanks to Alexandra Bitusikova for the nudge to do a VAA and Erik Jones for the valuable comments on the earlier drafts.

You can find the full paper and datasets here: www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01808-2