Volume 4 No 2 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

478 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:469for Democratic Slovakia, harbored most of the respondents expressing anti-Jewish attitudes. 21 The reformist successor of the Slovak Communist Party(Party of the Democratic Left) and the ethnic Hungarian Party (Party of theHungarian Coalition) expressed the lowest levels of social distance towardJews in 1999.FIGURE 4SOCIAL DISTANCE TOWARD JEWS IN 2008 BY POLITICAL PARTIESHungarian Coalition P.16.46%SMER - Social Democrats9.94Christian-Dem Movement9.46Slovak National Party7.69SDKU - Democratic P.5.880% 5% 10%15%Proportion of those who do not want to have Jews as their neighbors by partiesSource: European Values Survey 2008.Figure 4 shows that the degree of social distance toward Jewsremained stabilized around 10 percent among most of the supporters of allpolitical parties, according to the survey conducted by the European ValuesSurvey in 2008. One clear conclusion that emerges from this party-leveldata is that the political base of anti-Jewish support is highly unstable (cf.Gyárfášová, 2004; Kitschelt, 2007; Tucker, 2005). While voters of the ethnicHungarian Party were the least anti-Jewish in 1999, almost 20 percentof its supporters express anti-Jewish sentiment almost a decade later. A flipoccurred among voters of the Slovak National Party: in 1999, its votersexpressed the highest level of hostility toward the Jews, while in 2008 theyexpressed the relatively low level of social distance toward Jews.21. On Slovak populism and semi-authoritarianism, see Bunce and Wolchik(2010); Bustikova (2009); Bustikova and Kitschelt (2009); Deegan-Krause andHaughton (2009); Kopecky and Mudde (2003); Krekó, Szabados, Molnár, Juhász,and Kuli, 2010; and Vachudova (2005).