While no stranger to new political parties, Slovenia’s party system became much more unstable after 2008 with the constant arrival of electorally very successful parties. Further, while the citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and trust in political institutions has never reached the heights seen in Western Europe, the crisis years saw them drop to historical lows. In these circumstances, one may expect successful new parties to assure greater responsiveness, or a balance between responsible and responsive politics, and to bring improvements to citizens’ opinion on their satisfaction with democracy and trust in political institutions. In addition, new parties are usually more prone to democratic innovations, which can be associated with the popular idea of introducing stronger intra-party democracy in their internal functioning. The analysis shows that in 2014 Slovenia experienced both the nadir of public opinion on democracy and the political system, and the most electorally successful new party. Nevertheless, improvements in satisfaction with democracy and the political system only slowly emerged after 2014, to a considerable extent coinciding with the return to economic prosperity, while even these improvements left enough room for yet another successful new party at the 2018 elections. Concerning innovations in intra-party democracy, we are only able to identify some smaller democratic innovations. Given this, it seems that the new parties themselves have had a relatively limited impact on democracy in Slovenia.

Concerns have been raised over the possible link between the growing political polarisation and fears of autocratisation in Slovenia. Faced with a lack of empirical data, we seek to answer two questions. First, how has political polarisation developed in Slovenia? We show that Slovenia has experienced massive increases in both ideological and affective polarisation on the levels of the citizenry and political parties. Second, what has been the effect of political polarisation on liberal democracy in Slovenia? A GLS (generalised least squares) model for the period 1992 to 2022 confirms negative effects only for affective, but not ideological polarisation regarding V-Dem’s liberal democracy and judicial constraints on the executive indices. Keywords: Slovenia, affective polarisation, ideological polarisation, autocratisation, SJM