Based on a social constructivist framing, this article seeks to address the gap in the literature on the impact of Europeanisation on the national interest group political culture in general and in the post-communist context in particular. The impacts of Europeanisation on interest group domestic policy behaviour, in terms of national interest groups networking with their European counterparts, their contacts with EU-level decision makers, and their access to EU funds, are tested based on the panel surveys that were conducted in 1996 and 2012 of the most influential interest groups in eleven policy fields in Slovenia. Our key findings are that Europeanisation does support changes in the national interest group political culture in the direction of a more proactive approach in influencing national policy processes. However, Europeanisation explains only a small portion of the variability among the domestic policy behaviour of interest groups.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32724829
Local urban development is not determined by a collection of non-political and essentially technical measures prepared by professionals and civil servants in municipalities, but in fact strongly depends on the political nature of policy decisions and organised local interests. The planning of local urban development is, therefore, significantly influenced by political decisions based on the promises set out by political parties in their programmes. Thus, the direction of local development and the dynamics of urban growth cannot be fully understood without a thorough understanding of the views presented in party programmes. This paper aims to map the differences in Slovenian parliamentary party preferences related to local urban development across the political spectrum as well as over time (from 1990 to 2014). By implementing computer-assisted content analysis of 96 party programmes and election manifestos conventionally recognised as thematic text analysis, we identified an alarming image of the political landscape of Slovenia concerning topics related to local urban development. The analysis revealed that the majority of parties utilise local urban development concepts on a declarative level, with most dimensions of sustainable urban development being virtually absent.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33386077
This book concerns the characteristics, problems and prospects of EU public policies from the perspective of two countries – Slovenia and Croatia, which shared the common historical experience of the socialist system of former Yugoslavia; after independence, they both started seeking membership in the European integration. Over the last 25 years they have both experienced deep political, social and economic changes, while the European Union has played quite a significant role in these transformation processes – it has intervened in the operation of both countries’ political systems and the regulation of individual policy domains. The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with actors and processes, while the second focuses on an analysis of various policy sectors. The first set of policy sectors covers regulatory, distributive and redistributive policies (the economy, agriculture, cohesion, transport and the environment) regarding which a great proportion of sovereignty has been transferred to the EU level. The second set of policy sectors covers policies that are mostly ‘only’ coordinated at the EU level, while an important proportion of sovereignty has remained at the level of member states (employment and education). In this way, individual chapters analyse policy sectors in the respective country in three steps: main characteristics before accession to the EU (to identify any ‘mismatch’ between national and EU levels, whether the sector was non/problematic from the viewpoint of accession); the Europeanisation process (the EU’s role in reform processes); and the biggest problems and prospects in the period of full membership.
COBISS.SI-ID: 280996096
This article draws on the assumption that certain congruence between the parties' electoral platforms and of the succeeding government's performance shall exist in democratic systems and shall, as such, be considered as an important research topic for the researchers of democratic policy-making processes and political systems in general. In the article, we analyse whether the contents of parties' electoral programmes and the contents of key post-electoral governmental policy documents - that is, the coalition agreement, the government sessions' agenda and governmental weekly press releases correspond to each other. Slovenia, as one of the younger EU democracies, is used as a case study to test the application of the stated. Original Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) methodology for quantifying documents' content is applied and analysis primarily focuses on governmental period of the first right-centred government from 2004 to 2008. The conclusions confirm the existence of issue congruence in the period of the analysed electoral cycle, and at the same time reveal substantial specifics between the hierarchy of political to policy issue orientations of the government and its constitutive political parties. Consequently, an initiative for constructing a tentative theory of political documents is put forward on the basis of inductive research conclusions.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33394013
Researchers have so far focused only on a limited range of factors impacting on (Green) party developments. These factors could be broadly described as external and internal. Based on analysis of Slovenian Green parties, this book tests the often overlooked thesis that the characteristics of agency within the Green party segment in a given national party system may be a crucial factor in the long–term success or failure of Green parties within that system.
COBISS.SI-ID: 282555904