Pavol Babos

Comenius University Bratislava · Department of Sociology

Slovakia’s political system was put to a rather unusual test. While the COVID-19 pandemic was rapidly spreading in the European Union, the country went through parliamentary elections, coalition formation and new government being sworn, all in three-weeks time in March 2020. New Prime Minister Igor Matovič had never held an executive position befor...

The 2020 was an electoral year, which brought an alternation of the ruling elite in Slovakia. Therefore, it is useful to examine how the attitudes of political elites towards European integration are changing at the turn of the decade in Slovakia. In addition, it is interesting to study if and in which way political discourse interplays with media...

Pred voľbami sa azda každý politológ, novinár, ale aj bežní ľudia so záujmom o veci verejné pýta: kto vyhrá voľby? Ako bude vyzerať ďalšia vláda? Náš tím si však už dlhší čas pred parlamentnými voľbami 2016 kládol otázku, ako o voľbách a možnom obraze krajiny po voľbách rozprávajú Slováci? Vďaka pomerne častým prieskumom verejnej mienky približne v...

How do populists govern in crisis? We address this question by analyzing the actions of technocratic populists in power during the first wave of the novel coronavirus crisis in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We identify three features of the populist pandemic response. First, populists bypassed established, institutionalized channels of crisis re...

Televised political debates have become a permanent part of electoral campaigns, the campaign finale. However, evidence that such debates can shift voters’ attitudes is mixed, while the impact on voters’ preferences is highly doubted. Our research contributes to this debate based on empirical data on the effects of televised debates in the 2020 par...

This chapter looks at Slovakia and assesses how its representative model functions and if it interferes with EU dynamics. Formal institutions, such as the constitution and other legal norms regulating democratic processes in Slovakia, give the parliament supremacy in the system. When it comes to EU matters, parliament can direct and legally bind th...

Proliferation of populist policies and strengthening of political populism in several liberal democracies has been accompanied by campaigns full of public anger, anxiety and fear. Our research contributes to understanding how negative emotions shape selected political attitudes. We designed an experiment with 72 participants randomly assigned to th...

The popularity of televised political debates is growing, attracting millions of viewers. However, evidence that such debates can shift voters’ attitudes is mixed and the impact on voters’ preference is also mixed. In addition, the evidence comes mostly from presidential elections in the United States and almost exclusively from established democra...

Poverty research in post-communist Europe has been behind its western counter-parts but it is recently catching up. However, research of in-work poverty in the post-communist EU members is still rather scarce. This paper contributes to fill-ing that gap. Using EU-SILC microdata, supplemented by various country-level statistics, this paper has two a...

The objective of this study is to explore factors that affect the decisions single-child parents make when considering whether to have a second child applying the psychological theory of planned behaviour (TPB). Quantitative survey data from a sample of parents with a single child selected from a Slovak representative sample was used to perform reg...

you can download the file at http://www.cspv.sav.sk/fileadmin/user_upload/Aktuality/Publikacia_GMT/Global_Megatrends_from_Slovak_Point_of_View_06.pdf

This paper investigates the pattern of exiting unemployment in Slovakia during the period 2005 – 2009 using an alternative concept of unemployment represented by the self-perceived labour market status as measured by the EU-SILC dataset. In particular, we examine the effects on unemployment duration of the changes in labour regulations as captured...

After 25 years of political, social, and economic transition, the picture of the post-socialist world is rather diversiform. Seemingly, the array of countries from then Czechoslovakia to Kazakhstan set off from the same starting line after the communist regime collapsed. In this paper, we attempt to look into the black box of path dependency in pos...

What is the level of voter–elite congruence in Europe and how is it affected by institutions? This article presents a different conceptualisation and new data to comparative research on congruence between voters and their representatives in 15 European countries. The originality of this work is mainly in its use of the most appropriate cross-nation...

There is a well-established relationship between corruption perception and trust. However, the direction of causality is still an intensively discussed topic. This paper investigates relationships among corruption experience, perception and their impact on institutional trust. The main contribution of the paper is that it addresses the mutual causa...

In this paper we show that the neo-transitional economies are less neoliberal than could be expected given their 25-years long transition towards building market environment, supporting entrepreneurship and restoring capitalism in general. According to factor analysis results based on a cross-sectional sample of 134 countries during the period of 2...

This study addresses the often debated importance of structure for explaining voting behavior and cleavage formation in post-communist countries. Based on ecological analysis this study applies multivariate regression analysis (MRA) to test the possibilities and limits of structure in explaining the results of the 2012 parliamentary elections and 2...

Trust in political institutions is an important issue in contemporary democracies, as it contributes to democratic regimes’ legitimacy and sustainability. This paper investigates what effects corruption, political allegiance, and the post-communist history of a country have on political trust. Political trust is measured as trust towards parliament...

The economic crisis had profound effects on labour markets of the EU member states in terms of a decline in employment and a rise in unemployment. This paper investigates how the states limited the impact of the change in economic output on the employment and the unemployment. The analysis suggests that there are different labour market institution...

This article investigates the transition from fixed-term contracts to permanent jobs from the viewpoint of the ‘stepping stone versus trap’ theoretical framework. The main contribution of this research is that it examines what function fixed-term contracts have in the EU new member states, countries that have not yet been investigated in this regar...

Despite relatively low starting level, public debt has been rising quickly in the post-socialist New Member States (NMS) of the European Union. The rising international literature on the effects of debt on economic development provides several lessons, although it mostly deals with the advanced industrial countries. The aim of this paper is twofold...

This study explores the contradictory classifications of the post-communist Europe in the Varieties of Capitalism perspective. The paper outlines several shortcomings that contribute to the discrepancy in the past classifications. The empirical part of this paper compares two methods of the coordination index construction, the factor analysis and o...

Almost a decade has passed since the first post-communist states acceded to the EU. Ten years after confirmation of the successful establishment of democratic and market-economic institutions in these countries, it is time to ask what type of institutions really developed. This article critically reviews contemporary research into capitalism in the...