New Parties and Democracy in Slovenia

Abstract

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.

Development Processes for Changing the Party System in Slovenia and Montenegro

“…At the 2018 elections, LMŠ (the List of Marjan Šarec, a centre -right party) entered the Parliament. Except for Zares and the (United) Left, all of these parties were strongly reliant on their party leader (Malčič -Krašovec 2019). Here, Cerar represented the high point of the Slovenian electorate's search for a properly behaving political leader as he claimed to "transcend traditional political and ideological divisions and brought new standards of political culture" (Cabada -Tomšič 2016: 42).…”

Assured Newcomers on a Squally Sea? The Czech Pirate Party before and after the 2017 Elections

“…1 It is not surprising, therefore, that other significant studies are currently being dealt with in this respect from different points of view (e.g. Bolleyer, Bytzek 2017; Kosowska-Gąstoł, Sobolewska-Myślik 2017; Krašovec 2017; Ait-Aoudia 2018; Emanuele, Chiaramonte 2018; Hynčica, Šárovec 2018;Vidal 2018;Malčič, Krašovec 2019or Stankov 2019, which only highlights the relevance of the topic.…”