Between institutional political and policy agenda: An analysis of issue congruence in the 2004-2008 election cycle in Slovenia

In: Communist and post-communist studies, Band 48, Heft 1, S. 43-59

Abstract

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. [Copyright The Regents of the University of California; published by Elsevier Ltd.]