The Enduring Low Levels of Europeanization of Slovenian Political Parties: Evidence from Election Manifestos

Abstract

The Europeanization of national political parties is one of the most important topic areas in the Europeanization literature. Slovenian parties have slowly started to act in the arena of the European Union (EU) since the 1990s, and questions regarding the degree of their Europeanization have become increasingly relevant. In light of Ladrech’s conviction that the clearest types of evidence of Europeanization may be found in programme changes, we focus our research on party manifestos. By conducting a computer-assisted content analysis of 65 manifestos between 1990 and 2014, we were able to examine the presence of EU-related topics and the frequency of reference to these topics, utilizing a quantitative measure of party Europeanization. We conclude that the presence of Europe in Slovenian parliamentary party manifestos is a consequence of an incremental process that intensified with the turn of the millennium and peaked with Slovenia’s accession to the EU. In addition, we observe that the interaction of variables has an important effect on the salience of Europe in manifestos, with the variables involved in a mutual feedback process, thus indicating that size, governmental status and EU party links matter. In the case of fringe parties, party family proved relevant as well.