New Parties and (Non)Democratic Innovations: The Case of Slovenia

Since the 2011 elections, several new Slovenian parties have recorded exceptional results and two newcomers even received a plurality vote in the 2011 and 2014 elections. Their success has been connected with huge disappointment of voters with inability of the established parties to respond the economic and financial crisis adequately as well as with the more general dissatisfaction with functioning of democracy. Given that the newcomers have demonstrated some common elements attributed to entrepreneurial parties, and their common call on the elections on a need to introduce new politics, we are going to analyse newcomers’ internal organization to find out whether they in a rather short time have managed to introduce some democratic innovations/new politics at least in their internal party life; as the first step which can potentially lead also to assuring bigger quality of democracy in more general terms, or rather the opposite is true and strong presidentialization accompanied with low level of internal party democracy prevails.