Copycats? Slovenian Political Parties in the EU Arena

Political parties are undoubtedly the key political organizations in European politics, although at first glance this is not so obvious when studying European integration processes. The literature dealing with European integration processes and national political parties is marked in accordance with the three dominant approaches. The first deals with attempts to strengthen party activities outside the national political system, thus focusing on party groups in the European Parliament and on the development of European parties. The second approach focuses on the European public policy orientations of individual national political parties. The third approach focuses on the processes of Europeanization of national political parties. The latter is important in view of the organizational behaviour of political parties from the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which began to engage in European integration processes in the early 1990s. Political parties are organizations that adapt to the challenges or changes in the environments in which they operate, since their main goal is survival, both organizational and electoral. Thus, political parties from the post-socialist Central and Eastern European countries quickly began to face the challenges of adaptation to European party federations / European parties, in order to be able to work effectively and efficiently in the framework of the European Union's policy-making process. The paper focuses on the study of cooperation between Slovenian parliamentary political parties and European parties and the impact of this on two dimensions of Slovenian parties: changes in the parties’ internal organizational structure and changes in party programs or statutes. In the article, we will confine ourselves to the study of those Slovenian parliamentary parties that are formally connected (formally members) with respective European party. Given a fact that some parties in Slovenia have established cooperation with their European counterparts already in the 1990s, we in particular would like to find out if Slovenian parties have managed to influence functioning of the EU parties. Our research interest will also focus on identifying key elements that determine the level of cooperation between national and European parties, and the influence of the former. The paper will be based on the analysis of formal documents (statutes and programs of selected parliamentary parties) and relevant data obtained from investigated parliamentary parties.