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.

Corruption is perceived in all societies as a social pathology that causes great material and moral damage and is a threat to the society’s continual development. Especially in countries with a freshly consolidated democracy, as Slovenia, the phenomena of corruption must be treated with all due attention. This article emphasises that corruption in Slovenia is publicly perceived as one of the most important and even increasing problems in society. We are also analysing one of the crucial side effects of the corruption, resulting itself in ever deeper public distrust to most significant political and administrative institutions.

The article focuses on rise of nationalism and xenophobia in Slovenia. It starts by considering the issue of unrecognized minorities in Slovenia (former Yugoslavia nations) that have no minority rights, despite being large groups, as many international organizations for the protection of minorities have pointed out. A particular issue in this relation for Slovenia is the ‘Erased’ – the individuals who did not acquire Slovenian citizenship when Slovenia seceded from federal Yugoslavia – and despite the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision, the Slovenian state has still not recognized their rights, which were violated in the post-independence period. The article also examines two other minorities in Slovenia, the Jews and the Roma. The article finds Slovenia to be a closed, non-globalised society which, in spite of its constitutional declaration to protect the rights of minorities and other national communities, is seeking to retain a politically and culturally homogeneous nation state.

A detailed analysis of party organization, party funding and voting behaviour in parliament in Slovenia indicates a partial cartelization of Slovene party politics. In line with the cartel thesis, parties in Slovenia are heavily dependent on the state for their finances and there is evidence that parties have used the resources of the state to limit competition. Nonetheless, there is much less evidence of cartelization in terms of party organization indicating more cartelization in the party system as a whole than within individual parties.

The left–right schema has long been used in analyzing political cleavages in established democracies. This study applies the schema in a post-communist context by examining the structuring of political attitudes in Slovenia and Croatia. Findings from six public opinion surveys in each country during the 1990s demonstrate that left–right orientations in both countries are consistently influenced by religious beliefs, while an additional dimension focusing on democratization is found in Croatia. Economic issues did not constitute a significant axis of political competition. Changes and continuities in party locations and the basis of vote choice according to party supporters’ left–right placements are also discussed.

The authors proceed from the assumption that the institutional and economic efficiency of a particular country (or society) depends on its historic legacy or ‘path-dependence’, strategic interactions of the elite and the impact of the international environment. Estonia and Slovenia are both — not only economically, but also institutionally — perceived as relatively successful and prominent post-communist countries and new members of the EU. Yet they have developed completely different — in some aspects even diametrically opposite — regulative settings and socio-political arrangements. The main emphasis is on the connection between the dynamics and ideological preferences of political actors and the pace of reforms as well as institutional regulations. One can argue that the political elite in Estonia encouraged the shaping of the state in a direction close to the liberal-market model, whereas Slovenia is closer to the corporatist social welfare-state model. In both cases, some dysfunctional effects are evident that represent a new challenge to the elites and, at the same time, a test of their credibility and competence.

Understanding the evolution and growing importance of firms in post-communist countries is a critical new research direction for the study of communist and post-communist economies. In light of this, the primary purpose of this study is to identify the conditions necessary for the internationalization of enterprises from post-communist Slovenia, based on the responses of 298 firms currently engaged in the export of Slovenian products. The study supports the idea that many of the conditions necessary for international expansion of the firms are also applicable to firms from the post-communist economy, that is Slovenia. Environmental factors, including economic stability and cultural similarity, firm size and experience, stable markets, management strategies and other country-specific factors, were found to have significant influences on the participation of post-communist firms in the global economy. Environmental factors, including economic stability and cultural similarity, were found to be the most important in the factor analysis. Firm size and experience also exerted an influence on the internationalization of post-communist Slovenian firms. However, stable markets were found to be more important than firm size or management strategies at this point in time. Slovenia’s small size, its former command economy, and other country-specific factors, were also found to have significant influences for the firms involved in this study.

The article discusses, through conceptual elaboration and empirical investigation, the interplay between the perception of smallness and the concept of national identity in the case of Slovenia’s integration into the European Union. Unlike the prevailing literature on Slovenia, the authors do not take Slovenia’s smallness for granted. They argue that, in the particular case of Slovenian identity-building, smallness as an independent variable does not feature frequently at all. The research is based on methodological pluralism, with a special emphasis on political discourse, the mass media and public opinion in Slovenia