69
Referencing the Public by Populist 
and Non-populist Parties in the 
Slovene Parliament
Darja FIŠER
Institute of Contemporary History
Tjaša KONOVŠEK
Institute of Contemporary History
Andrej PANČUR
Institute of Contemporary History
The present moment raises many questions about the workings and resilience 
of parliamentary democracy in Western-type democracies, including the for-
mer socialist states of the East Central European region, where various forms 
of populism and illiberal democracy are taking shape. Among these, Slovenia is 
taken as a case study, since it is not only a former socialist state, but was also 
for a long time acknowledged as a post-socialist success story. Focusing on the 
central state institution in systems of parliamentary democracy, i.e. the parlia-
ment, and its members (MPs) this paper considers speech as performed during 
parliamentary sessions by MPs from populist and non-populist political parties 
between the years 1992 and 2018, the period of a fully democratic Slovene 
national parliament. It combines the methodological approaches of cultural 
history with corpus linguistics in order to map any possible differences in popu-
list and non-populist discourse of MPs. Special attention is given to situations 
where MPs mentioned the public, thus testing the hypothesis that populist MPs 
engage more with the public as a part of their populist political style.
Keywords: political parties, populism, life-world, parliament, Slovenia
Fišer, D., Konovšek, T., Pančur, A.: Referencing the Public by Populist and  
Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament. Slovenščina 2.0, 11(1): 69–90. 
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original Scientific Article
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4312/slo2.0.2023.1.69-90
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
70
Slovenščina 2.0, 2023 (1) | Articles
1 Introduction
In the last two decades, the political scene in many democratic coun-
tries in Europe as well as around the globe has witnessed an increase 
in active populist political parties and a rise in their popularity among 
voters. Interpretations of this phenomenon vary from populism and il-
liberal democracy as serious threats to parliamentary democracy, to 
those who see it as a transitory phase of the otherwise firm rule of de-
mocracy.1 Parallel to the spread of populism, many research fields 
have started to dedicate some of their attention to the phenomenon 
itself: its origins, developments, varieties, meanings and possible 
consequences. They attempted (and are still attempting) to map out 
populism in a variety of the spaces in which it appears, from media 
landscapes to popular and policy responses. Political science and so-
ciological analyses pay special attention many of these, mainly through 
a lens of discursive practices of the most visible members of populist 
political parties.2 By doing so, recent research has noted a clear differ-
ence between the discourses of members of populist and non-populist 
parties, especially when using social and other media.
However, much less is known about the relationship between 
populist and non-populist discourse in the speeches of members of 
parliament (MPs) in political systems of parliamentary democracy, in 
which parliaments are the central representative, legislative, and con-
trolling state institutions. One of the most common interpretations of 
populism, especially combined with illiberal democracy in the area of 
East Central Europe, is the idea of the unfinished transition from state 
socialism to parliamentary democracy and market economy.3 Inef-
ficient, incomplete breaks with the past systems, the socialist men-
tality of the population and the corruption of political and economic 
elites stretching from the time of socialism to the present, are often 
1 As one of the most resounding discussions on this topic, see: Ivan Krastev and Stephen Hol-
mes, The Light That Failed: A Reckoning. London: Penguin Books, 2019.
2 Emanuela Fabijan in Marko Ribać, “Politični in medijski populizem v televizijskem političnem 
intervjuju,” Social Science Forum, Vol. 37, Nr. 98 (2021), pp. 43–68.
3 Joachim von Puttkamer, Włodzimierz Borodziej and Stanislav Holubec (eds.), From Revolu-
tion to Uncertainty: The Year 1990 in Central and Eastern Europe. London: New York: Rout-
ledge, 2019. Rudi Rizman, Uncertain Path. Democratic transition and consolidation in Slove-
nia. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006.
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Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament
used as an explanations for current deviations from parliamentary 
democracy.
However, a great deal of research stresses the lack of empirical evi-
dence to support such claims and has long been criticizing the general 
view underlining such an interpretation,4 and this paper aims at contrib-
uting to this literature. The analysis conducted here is localized to the 
case of Slovenia as one of the former socialist states that has not (thus 
far) completely submitted to populism and illiberal democracy, yet its 
political and media space clearly exhibits some populist tendencies. To 
bring further nuances and critical understanding to the existence of mod-
ern-day populism, this paper is embedded around two key concepts.
This paper is an extended version of the conference paper of a con-
ference contribution.5 Here, we widened the methodological framework 
and strengthened the interdisciplinary nature of the analysis, embed-
ding digital humanities deeper into historical interpretation. To achieve 
this, we first used the concept of the life-world to acknowledge the ex-
istence of a specific reality of MPs in which their speech, as analysed in 
this paper, is made. Second, we draw on the existing typology of populist 
and non-populist parties created by political scientists and sociologists 
to see how MPs from two different groups of political parties, i.e. populist 
and non-populist, construct their view of the public, thus taking into ac-
count the existing indications of populists’ and populisms’ unique con-
nection to a public it perceives as its own.6 The goal of this analysis is to 
detect any differences between populist and non-populist discourse, as 
observed through the lens of references to the general public.
2 Approach and methodology
To further investigate the connection between the speech of MPs, 
their image of the public, and their populist or non-populist origin, we 
4 Valeria Bunce, “Should transitologists be grounded?”, Slavic Review, Vol. 54, Nr. 1 (1995), pp. 
126–127. Thomas Carothers, “The end of transition paradigm”, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 
13, Nr. 1 (2002), pp. 17–20.
5 Darja Fišer, Tjaša Konovšek in Andrej Pančur, “Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-
Populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament,” Darja Fišer and Tomaš Erjavec (eds.), Proceed-
ings of the Conference on Language Technologies and Digital Humanities. September 15 – 
16 2022. Ljubljana, Slovenia. Ljubljana: Inštitut na novejšo zgodovino, 2022, pp. 243–247. 
https://nl.ijs.si/jtdh22/pdf/JTDH2022_Proceedings.pdf (January 6 2022).
6 See further text below for references.
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Slovenščina 2.0, 2023 (1) | Articles
combine the methodological framework of cultural history of parlia-
mentarianism with corpus linguistics.
From a historical perspective, we draw on recent developments in 
political history, focusing on the cultural side of the history of parlia-
mentarism. This includes topics such as: the ideal image and work-
ings of parliaments as an institution in the modern period as proposed 
by prominent scholars, thinkers and writers, the image of parliaments 
as architectural settings and as communicated by the media, parlia-
ments as a space of specific communication, and – last but not least 
– parliament(arianism) as a concept in its own right.7 In this paper we 
build on the concept of life-world (or Lebenswelt), which has to a small 
extent already been used in relation to parliamentarism – or, better, the 
people who shape it.8
The concept of life-world originated in philosophy, where it stressed 
that subjective experience of parliamentarism was identical with the 
reality of parliamentarism as such. In this respect, the life-world of MPs 
consists of their own experiences but also to a significant degree of 
how parliamentarism is seen by others.9 The concept of life-world has 
been used in historiography to emphasize the circumstances in which 
parliamentarianism is experienced, focusing on MPs as historical ac-
tors.10 In this case, this approach brings to the fore research questions 
about MPs’ perceptions, education, and expectations; their political 
socialization, prior experiences, and everyday life; and the influence of 
collective opinions, public images, and the media on their work. In this 
paper, we focus on one of the aspects of MPs’ life-world as used in 
historiography, namely the MPs’ relationship with the public, through 
7 Remieg Aerts, The Ideal of Parliament in Europe Since 1800. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 
2019. Jure Gašparič, Državni zbor 1992-2012: o slovenskem parlamentarizmu. Ljubljana: 
Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino, 2012. Andreas Schulz and Andreas Wirsching (eds.), Parlam-
entarische Kulturen in Europa. Das Parlament als Kommunikationsraum. Düsseldorf: Droste 
Verlag, 2012. Pasi Ihalainen, Cornelia Ilie, and Kari Palonen (eds.), Parliament and Parlia-
mentarism. A Comparative History of a European Concept. Berghahn, 2016.
8 Adéla Gjuričová and Tomáš Zahradníček, Návrat parlamentu. Česi a Slováci ve Federálním 
shromáždění. Praha: Argo, 2018.
9 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale 
Phänomenologie: eine Einleitung und die phänomenologische Philosophie. Hamburg: Meiner, 
1996 (1962). Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Lifeworld and 
system: a critique of functionalist reason. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
10 Adéla Gjuričová, Andreas Schulz, Luboš Velek and Andreas Wirsching (eds.). Lebenswelten 
von Abgeordneten in Europa 1860–1990. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2014.
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Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament
the words they choose to refer to them. This, in turn, reveals a part of 
their self-understanding, including their intentionally or unintentionally 
expressed relation to populism.
Within the framework of life-world we further distinguish between 
Slovenian populist and non-populist parties on two axes. First, based on 
the profile of political parties, we draw on existing research for the cri-
teria to determine which Slovenian political parties qualify as populist. 
Second, on the temporal axis, we acknowledge the profound political 
changes of 1990 (Slovene independence and the democratization and 
pluralization of political space), when the MPs of the Slovene assembly 
were freely elected for the first time; and the political changes of 2004 
(when Slovenia joined the EU and NATO) as a year that witnessed the 
active beginnings of modern populism in the Slovene political space. We 
take into account the difference between modern populist parties, as 
they emerged in the last decade and a half, and their immediate precur-
sors, which have existed since the early 1990s. Therefore, the analysis 
treats the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and its predecessor, the So-
cial Democratic Party of Slovenia (SDSS), along with the New Slovenia 
(NSi) and the Slovenian National Party (Slovenska nacionalna stranka, 
SNS), as populist parties, while all others were classified as non-populist.
We followed three basic and pre-established criteria in determin-
ing which political party may be considered populist in a present-day 
sense. First, a populist political party and its members must address 
the public as an exclusive group and reinforce their identity by empha-
sizing an external threat. Second, such politicians or political parties 
claim to be the only true representatives of the public, the best repre-
sentatives of their interests, non-corrupt, and their guardians from the 
(real or imaginary) external threat. Third, populists actively undermine 
the central state institutions, the rule of law and the wider democratic 
mechanisms, such as the media.11 In a historical sense, some uncer-
11 Danica Fink Hafner, Populizem. Ljubljana: Založba FDV, 2019. Ana Frank in Iztok Šori, “Nor-
malizacija rasizma z jezikom demokracije: primer Slovenske demokratske stranke,” Časopis 
za kritiko znanosti, Vol. 43, Nr. 260 (2015), pp. 89–103. Giovanna Campani in Mojca Pajnik, 
“Populism in historical perspectives”. In Gabriella Lazaridis and Giovanna Campani (eds.), 
Understanding the Populist Shift: Othering in a Europe in Crisis. London: New York: Routledge, 
2017, pp. 13–30.
 Iztok Šori, “Za narodov blagor: skrajno desni populizem v diskurzu stranke Nova Slovenija,” 
Časopis za kritiko znanosti, Vol. 43, Nr. 260 (2015), pp. 104–117. Jurij Hadalin, “Straight 
74
Slovenščina 2.0, 2023 (1) | Articles
tainty arose when deciding which predecessors of later or currently ex-
isting political parties to include in the analysis under populist. While 
there is no general criteria on how to measure the (dis)continuity of po-
litical parties through longer periods of time, we chose to take into con-
sideration only those pairs of political parties and their predecessors 
that have a very strong continuity in their leadership and prominent 
tendencies towards populism or populist style of activity as described 
by the three criteria above. For example, the NSi party that has existed 
since 2000 on the one hand maintains strong continuity towards the 
Slovene Cristian Democrats (SKD), Slovene People’s Party (SLS), and 
later towards the united Slovene People’s Party and Slovene Christian 
Democrats (SLS+SKD); but on the other a much weaker one both in the 
sense of policymaking, political leadership, and public perception.
From a historiographical point of view, there is one more issue that 
needs to be addressed, namely the question of how to include breaks 
in historical development – usually clearly visible and often the centre 
of attention in qualitative analysis – into quantitative analysis in an in-
terdisciplinary environment. In order to take advantage of a large data-
set available for this analysis, some breaks in political history (such as 
the year 2004) are only indicated as points of change and not as full 
endpoints of a period. While searching for additional context for inter-
pretation of the results of the present analysis in wider domestic as 
well as international political developments would certainly add value, 
we decided to maintain our focus on the Slovene parliament. Each par-
liamentary lifespan has its own specific periodization, stretching from 
one election to other, from one coalition formation to the next, and on 
the smaller scale from session to session. This remains the basic time 
frame of the present analysis which, at the same time, allowed us to 
make only limited assumptions about the possible outside influences 
on the Slovene parliamentary life before the analysis was carried out.
Talk. The Slovenian National Party’s Programme Orientations and Activities,” Contributions 
to Contemporary History, Vol. 60, Nr. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.51663/pnz.60.2.10. Jurij 
Hadalin, “What Would Henrik Tuma Say? From The Social Democratic Party of Slovenia to 
the Slovenian Democratic Party,” Contributions to Contemporary History Vol. 61. Nr. 3 (2021), 
https://doi.org/10.51663/pnz.61.3.10. Marko Lovec (ed.), Populism and attitudes towards 
the EU in Central Europe. Ljubljana: Faculty of Social Sciences, 2019. Mojca Pajnik, “Media 
Populism on the Example of Right-Wing Political Parties’ Communication in Slovenia,” Prob-
lems of Post-Communism, Vol. 66, Nr. 1 (2019), pp. 21–32.
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Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament
3 Analysing MPs’ speech
Using corpus linguistics has, in this case, proven vital for managing an 
enormous set of data, i.e. the minutes of the parliamentary sessions of 
the Slovene assembly (formally named as the parliament in the 1991 
Constitution) that were collected and made available for use through 
the CLARIN repository.12 The analysis is based on the Slovenian parlia-
mentary corpus (1990-2018) siParl 2.0, which contains minutes of the 
Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia for 11th legislative period 1990-
1992, minutes of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia 
from the 1st to the 7th legislative periods 1992-2018, minutes of the 
working bodies of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia 
from the 2nd to the 7th legislative periods 1996-2018, and minutes 
of the Council of the President of the National Assembly from the 2nd 
to the 7th legislative periods 1996-2018. The corpus comprises over 
10,000 sessions, one million speeches or 200 million words.13
In our analysis we take into account the time span from 1992 when 
the first term of the Slovenian parliament started until 2018 when 
the seventh term ended. The time frame thus includes some impor-
tant events that affected the development of Slovenian political par-
ties, their governing style and, by extension, the actions of MPs, such 
as Slovenia’s accession to the European Union in 2004,14 the global 
financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, and the migrant crisis in 2015.15 
Using the typology advocated by sociologists and political scientists 
(see Section 2), we created subcorpora of populist and non-populist 
political parties for each parliamentary term, resulting in a total of 14 
subcorpora. The subcorpora ranged between just under a million to-
kens in Term1 to 12 million tokens in Term7 for populist parties, and 
between 7 million tokens in Term1 to just under 15 million tokens in 
Term7 for non-populist parties.
12 CLARIN Slovenia. Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure. http://www.
clarin.si/info/about/ (December 28, 2022).
13 Andrej Pančur, Tomaž Erjavec, Mihael Ojsteršek, Mojca Šorn and Neja Blaj Hribar, Slovenian 
parliamentary corpus (1990-2018) siParl 2.0, Slovenian language resource repository CLA-
RIN.SI (2020), ISSN 2820-4042, http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1300.
14 Gašparič, Državni zbor, pp. 108–151.
15 Benjamin Moffitt, “How to Perform Crisis: A Model for Understanding the Key Role of Crisis in 
Contemporary Populism,” Government and Opposition, Vol. 50, Nr. 2 (2015), pp. 189–217.
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The next step of the analysis presented a challenge, as there are 
no pre-existing wordlists of references to the general public that we 
could rely on. We therefore generated frequency lists of nouns for each 
subcorpus and manually selected those that refer to the public in the 
broadest sense (e.g. person, citizen, inhabitant) from the 1,000 most 
frequent nouns in each subcorpus. We only took into account the nouns 
that can only refer to people (groups or individuals), disregarding those 
that can also be used for institutions (e.g. association) or objects (e.g. 
school). We also checked their usage via a concordance search and dis-
carded the expressions that could potentially be used for the general 
public but in this specific corpus predominantly refer to the MPs, the 
government or their staff (e.g. proposer).
As can be seen in Table 1, this yielded a total of 86 unique nouns 
with the total absolute frequency of 359,320 and relative frequency 
of 7,322.53 for the populist parties, and the total absolute frequency 
of 524,195 and relative frequency of 6,788.74 for their non-populist 
counterparts. Most (69) of the nouns are shared between both party 
groups (coloured in white, e.g. victim, neighbour, human, Roma, pa-
tient), in addition to 10 that are unique for the populist MPs (coloured 
in pink, e.g. Croat, wife, Austrian) and seven that are specific to non-
populist MPs (coloured in blue, e.g. stakeholder, recipient, tenant).
Table 1: List of specific and joint public-related words identified in the subcorpora of popu-
list and non-populist speeches with their absolute and relative frequencies as well as the 
usage ratio
    POPULIST1-7 NON-POPULIST1-7  
  #tokens 49,070,504 77,215,381  
  #lemmas 76 74  
  LEMMA AF RF AF RF P:N ratio
P-
O
N
LY
Hrvat
Croat
1,341 27.33 0 0.00 /
žena
woman
397 8.09 0 0.00 /
Avstrijec
Austrian
318 6.48 0 0.00 /
Diplomant
graduate
300 6.11 0 0.00 /
77
Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament
    POPULIST1-7 NON-POPULIST1-7  
  #tokens 49,070,504 77,215,381  
  #lemmas 76 74  
  LEMMA AF RF AF RF P:N ratio
P-
O
N
LY
storilec
perpetrator
232 4.73 0 0.00 /
volivec
voter
161 3.28 0 0.00 /
delojemalec
employee
36 0.73 0 0.00 /
Neslovenec
Non-Slovenian
31 0.63 0 0.00 /
svojec
family member
27 0.55 0 0.00 /
delavka
worker (female)
0 0.00 0 0.00 /
deležnik
stakeholder
0 0.00 1,784 23.10 /
N
-O
N
LY
prejemnik
recepient
0 0.00 1,191 15.42 /
najemnik
tenant
0 0.00 983 12.73 /
dolžnik
debtor
0 0.00 752 9.74 /
vajenec
apprentice
0 0.00 444 5.75 /
kadilec
smoker
0 0.00 290 3.76 /
krajan
townsman
0 0.00 172 2.23 /
JO
IN
T
oče
father
929 18.93 329 4.26 4.44
obrtnik
craftsman
1,187 24.19 540 6.99 3.46
davkoplačevalec
taxpayer
4,762 97.04 2,178 28.21 3.44
migrant
migrant
2,627 53.54 1,255 16.25 3.29
vlagatelj
investor
426 8.68 260 3.37 2.58
podjetnik
enterpreneur
3,880 79.07 2,671 34.59 2.29
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Slovenščina 2.0, 2023 (1) | Articles
    POPULIST1-7 NON-POPULIST1-7  
  #tokens 49,070,504 77,215,381  
  #lemmas 76 74  
  LEMMA AF RF AF RF P:N ratio
JO
IN
T
moški
man
827 16.85 619 8.02 2.10
ljudstvo
people
3,089 62.95 2,376 30.77 2.05
Italijan
Italian
272 5.54 216 2.80 1.98
Slovenka
Slovenian (female)
1,432 29.18 1,143 14.80 1.97
pacient
patient
1,619 32.99 1,452 18.80 1.75
zamejstvo
autochtonous 
Slovenian region
1,067 21.74 966 12.51 1.74
kmet
farmer
6,839 139.37 6,739 87.28 1.60
prijatelj
friend
1,024 20.87 1,012 13.11 1.59
naročnik
subscriber
517 10.54 516 6.68 1.58
Slovenec
Slovenian
10,103 205.89 11,090 143.62 1.43
dijak
student
2,403 48.97 2,670 34.58 1.42
kupec
buyer
1,216 24.78 1,357 17.57 1.41
državljan
citizen
21,570 439.57 24,828 321.54 1.37
priča
witness
4,061 82.76 4,701 60.88 1.36
državljanka
citizen (female)
6,902 140.65 8,372 108.42 1.30
narod
nation
4,952 100.92 6,035 78.16 1.29
žrtev
victim
3,945 80.39 4,810 62.29 1.29
sosed
neighbour
738 15.04 928 12.02 1.25
79
Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament
    POPULIST1-7 NON-POPULIST1-7  
  #tokens 49,070,504 77,215,381  
  #lemmas 76 74  
  LEMMA AF RF AF RF P:N ratio
JO
IN
T
človek
human
68,517 1,396.30 86,824 1,124.44 1.24
Rom
Roma
627 12.78 808 10.46 1.22
bolnik
patient
1,279 26.06 1,717 22.24 1.17
prosilec
applicant
343 6.99 468 6.06 1.15
javnost
public
16,248 331.12 22,367 289.67 1.14
starš
parent
5,732 116.81 7,893 102.22 1.14
oseba
person
16,836 343.10 23,762 307.74 1.11
subjekt
subject
3,406 69.41 4,866 63.02 1.10
družina
family
11,120 226.61 16,298 211.07 1.07
otrok
child
18,205 371.00 26,762 346.59 1.07
gost
guest
966 19.69 1,438 18.62 1.06
begunec
refugee
1,247 25.41 1,879 24.33 1.04
mladina
youth
1,384 28.20 2,101 27.21 1.04
delničar
shareholder
444 9.05 684 8.86 1.02
tujec
foreigner
3,169 64.58 4,908 63.56 1.02
zavarovanec
insurance holder
896 18.26 1,394 18.05 1.01
volivec
voter
3,478 70.88 5,544 71.80 0.99
lastnik
owner
8,031 163.66 12,814 165.95 0.99
mati
mother
320 6.52 512 6.63 0.98
80
Slovenščina 2.0, 2023 (1) | Articles
    POPULIST1-7 NON-POPULIST1-7  
  #tokens 49,070,504 77,215,381  
  #lemmas 76 74  
  LEMMA AF RF AF RF P:N ratio
JO
IN
T
družba
society
23,431 477.50 38,532 499.02 0.96
študent
student
4,973 101.34 8,202 106.22 0.95
posameznik
individual
7,367 150.13 12,307 159.39 0.94
zavezanec
person liable
2,437 49.66 4,096 53.05 0.94
uporabnik
user
3,441 70.12 5,866 75.97 0.92
nosilec
holder
2,211 45.06 3,812 49.37 0.91
občan
resident
1,558 31.75 2,688 34.81 0.91
prebivalec
inhabitant
5,318 108.37 9,404 121.79 0.89
partner
partner
4,580 93.34 8,312 107.65 0.87
potrošnik
consumer
1,657 33.77 3,060 39.63 0.85
generacija
generation
2,279 46.44 4,215 54.59 0.85
delavec
worker
10,768 219.44 20,055 259.73 0.84
invalid
disabled person
3,032 61.79 5,760 74.60 0.83
prebivalstvo
population
2,727 55.57 5,452 70.61 0.79
manjšina
minority
2,742 55.88 5,518 71.46 0.78
učenec
pupil
1,437 29.28 3,071 39.77 0.74
ženska
female
2,941 59.93 6,517 84.40 0.71
upokojenec
retiree
3,547 72.28 8,097 104.86 0.69
skupnost
community
16,208 330.30 38,163 494.24 0.67
81
Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament
    POPULIST1-7 NON-POPULIST1-7  
  #tokens 49,070,504 77,215,381  
  #lemmas 76 74  
  LEMMA AF RF AF RF P:N ratio
JO
IN
T 
pripadnik
member
1,375 28.02 3,238 41.93 0.67
upravičenec
beneficiary
1,673 34.09 4,523 58.58 0.58
upnik
creditor
566 11.53 1,725 22.34 0.52
podpisnik
signatory
465 9.48 1,460 18.91 0.50
udeleženec
participant
500 10.19 1,685 21.82 0.47
porabnik
consumer
129 2.63 540 6.99 0.38
populacija
population
480 9.78 2,179 28.22 0.35
Total 359,320 7,322.53 524,195 6,788.74 1.08
The list of populist-specific nouns contains words describing peo-
ple according to their ethnic background (e.g. Austrian, non-Sloveni-
an), family role (e.g. relative, wife) and employment status (e.g. female 
worker, employee). Non-populist-specific nouns contain expressions 
which describe the role or status of a person in an administrative or 
legal procedure (e.g. stakeholder, recepient), business transaction (e.g. 
tenant, debtor), origin (e.g. local), education (e.g. apprentice) or health 
status (e.g. smoker). Among the joint nouns, father, craftsman, taxpay-
er and migrant are used three times more frequently by populist MPs, 
whereas beneficiary, participant, consumer and population are used 
more than twice as frequently by non-populist MPs. Insurance holder, 
voter and owner are used nearly identically by both groups of MPs. This 
might reflect a difference between the populist and non-populist par-
ties and their focus in their political base: while the first usually rally 
voters from rural areas, the latter are traditionally more successful in 
urban ones.
82
Slovenščina 2.0, 2023 (1) | Articles
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83
Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament
Figure 1: Relative frequency of nouns (y axis) referring to the public in speeches of MPs 
from populist and non-populist political parties in the Slovene parliament 1992–2018, by 
parliamentary term (x axis).
As can be seen from Table 2 and Figure 1, we observe a steady 
general upwards trend in the use of nouns, describing the public in 
both populist and non-populist parties over time. For all terms com-
bined, populist MPs refer to the public statistically significantly more 
frequently than their non-populist counterparts (P-value 1.41E-269, 
X2 test 1230.539416), which confirms the main hypothesis. For all the 
MPs combined, the only, and quite substantial, drop in the frequency 
of references to the public can be observed from Term1 and Term2, 
which could be contributed to the early stages of the formation of the 
Slovenian political space. A lot of the discussions in parliament in these 
years were dedicated to shaping the new political system and (some-
what) changing the political culture, at the very least accepting new-
comers to the parliamentary life and acquainting them with the work of 
an MP. However, this does not extend to a claim that the public was not 
important. On the contrary – already in the 1980s, before democrat-
ic changes took place, Slovenia was a stage for an active civil society 
that contributed towards legal and political democratization as well as 
proposed many possible solutions for the various political crises at the 
time, including drafts for a new constitution.17
16 Calc: Corpus Calculator. https://www.korpus.cz/calc/ (December 27 2022).
17 Božo Repe, Slovenci v osemdesetih letih. Ljubljana: Zveza zgodovinskih društev Slovenije, 2001.
 
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
9000
T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 T7
Populist Non-populist Combined
84
Slovenščina 2.0, 2023 (1) | Articles
 Especially in Term1, the MPs had to face many questions of estab-
lishing the working of the new parliament itself. It took time before a 
new normality of the parliamentary work was established, before the 
MPs began to address the public more. While the early Slovene political 
transition exhibited a general consensus about the need to strengthen 
parliamentary democracy, the year after were and remain much less 
clear. In the years leading up to 2004, a new political aim became 
central, i.e. Slovenia’s integration into the European Union, which to a 
certain extent offered a new common political goal for all the parlia-
mentary parties. Nonetheless, the seemingly simple aim – to join the 
EU – contained a variety of different visions of how to actually achieve 
it, and political parties turned more and more to the public to try and 
gain (or maintain) their support throughout each voting cycle.18
After 2004, another major political shift took place. Slovenia was 
still an independent and sovereign state, but not as much as it has been 
in the previous years. Some of the state institutions had to adjust their 
functions and transmit a part of their decision-making process and ju-
risdictions on the supranational level of the EU.19 With this earlier goal 
successfully achieved (Slovenia joined the EU on May 1 2004), the Slo-
vene political space faced further polarization. This was reflected in the 
frequency and content of references of the public by the MPs, since 
they had to search for new contents of policy-making and ways of ad-
dressing their voters in an absence of a clear political goal.
As for individual terms, populist MPs refer to the public statistically 
significantly more often in Terms2-4 (1996–2008) and 7 (2014–2018) 
with Term4 as the biggest outlier, while the opposite is true of Terms5-6 
with Term5 as the biggest outlier. In Term1, non-populist MPs use more 
public-denominating expressions but the difference is not statistically 
significant. Terms2-3 can be interpreted as the period of formation of 
populist parties (1992–2004), with Term4 (2004–2008) being the first 
parliamentary term working with a populist (SDS-led) government. The 
18 Božo Repe, Jutri je nov dan: Slovenci in razpad Jugoslavije. Ljubljana: Modrijan, 2002, p. 7. 
Gašparič, Državni zbor, pp. 124–143.
19 Danica Fink-Hafner and Damjan Lah, Proces evropeizacije in prilagajanja političnih ustanov na 
nacionalni ravni. Ljubljana: Fakulteta za družbene vede, 2005, pp. 82-83. Danica Fink-Hafner 
and Damjan Lah, Managing Europe from Home: The Europeanisation of the Slovene Core Ex-
ecutive. Ljubljana: Fakulteta za družbene vede, 2003, p. 36.
85
Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament
switch towards more populist tendencies of SDS was at this time re-
flected in a new name (the party renamed itself from SDS – Social-
demokratska stranka/Social Democratic Party to SDS – Slovenska 
demokratska stranka/Slovene Democratic Party) and its succession 
to the European People’s Party (EPP).20 In turn, Term7 (2014–2018) 
could suggest the emergence of the second-wave growing power of 
populist parties in the face of the crisis of the non-populist parties – not 
only in Slovenia, but all across Europe.21
In Terms5-6 (2008–2014), when references to the general pub-
lic prevailed in what sociologists and political scientists refer to as the 
non-populist discourse, the Slovenian political space witnessed an 
emergence of numerous new political parties, many of which entered 
parliament, which influenced the relation between populist and non-
populist discourse.22 Due to the safe-guards in parliamentary proce-
dures which ensure equal opportunity of participation for opposition 
MPs regardless of their number, the speeches of MPs might also be 
influenced by the existence of populist and non-populist led govern-
ments and the strength of the populist and non-populist parties in the 
parliament at the time. While party strength is usually counted by the 
number of seats taken in the parliament, there are many more fac-
tors that influence it and make the correlation between the number 
of seats, coalition and opposition roles, and party strength.23 Many of 
the parliamentary debates were influenced by the impact of the global 
economic crisis.24
20 Thomas Jansen, At Europe’s Service: the origins and evolution of the European People’s Party. 
Berlin: Heidelberg: New York: Springer, 2011.
21 James F. Downes and Edward Chan, “Explaining the electoral debacle of social democratic 
parties in Europe,” EUROPP. European Politics and Policy. London School of Economic. https://
blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2018/06/21/explaining-the-electoral-debacle-of-social-demo-
cratic-parties-in-europe/ (December 29, 2022). Stuart A. Brown, The European Commission 
and Europe’s Democratic Process. Why the EU’s Executive Faces an Uncertain Future. London: 
Palgrave Pivot, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50560-6.
22 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Observation of early parliamentary 
elections in Slovenia, 4 December 2011: OSCE/ODIHR Election Assessment Mission Final Re-
port. https://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/Slovenia/87786 (December 29 2022).
23 Giovanni Sartori, Parties and party systems: a framework for analysis. Colchester: ECPR, 
2005. Alenka Krašovec, Moč v političnih strankah: odnosi med parlamentarnimi in central-
nimi deli političnih strank. Ljubljana: Fakulteta za družbene vede, 2000.
24 Gašparič, Državni zbor, pp. 144-145.
86
Slovenščina 2.0, 2023 (1) | Articles
4 Concluding remarks
While the results do confirm our initial hypothesis that populist par-
ties refer to the public more, the difference between the two groups 
– populist and non-populist – appears to be smaller than the current 
findings of studies in sociology and political science suggest. Where re-
search from these two fields mainly focuses on the speech of members 
of populist parties in (selected) television interviews, on social media, 
and other, less rigid environments, this contribution focused on taking 
into account all the speeches of MPs throughout the Slovenian parlia-
ment, which is a highly institutionalized and regulated environment 
that probably allows for less differentiation between MPs of different 
political orientation. Our results show that the same life-world of MPs, 
marked by their shared experience, social forms, norms, and a shared 
dialogue in plenary sessions, provides an environment with a strong 
unifying factor. Although there is little doubt that political parties them-
selves differ decisively from one another, the power of the institution, 
its rigidity and specificity, as well as MPs awareness of the target audi-
ence and reach of their speeches, proved to be decisive factors in MPs 
speech when speaking about the public.
According to political scientists and historians, the political space 
in Slovenia has been increasingly polarized since 1992. Again, our re-
sults show a somewhat more nuanced picture: while a growing differ-
ence between populist and non-populist discourse can be observed in 
Terms2-4, the gap narrows in Terms5-7. This challenges the dominant 
narrative of the Slovenian political space. The record high frequency 
of references to the public by populist MPs in Term4 coincides with 
the SDS winning the 2004 election for the first time after 1992, which 
happened immediately after the party went through its populist trans-
formation in 2003. In Term5 the SDS witnessed a backlash with the 
non-populist coalition prevailing, while one of the populist parties, the 
NSi, did not even reach the parliamentary threshold.
The general public as well as the media frequently also refer to sev-
eral of the more recent parties, such as Levica (The Left), as populist. 
While these parties do exhibit a certain populist appeal, their content, 
attitudes towards experts and state institutions, as well as their actions 
87
Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament
in the parliament place them in the non-populist spectrum, with Levica 
gravitating more towards the democratic socialism25 than to the same 
category of populism as defined by Mudde26 which was the theoretical 
framework of this study. Another methodological issue is temporality: 
the modern populist shift is a phenomenon belonging to the 21st cen-
tury; as such, the decade after 1992, included in our analysis, requires 
a separate interpretation and can only be understood as a preface to 
the later populist shift.27
Acknowledgments
The work described in this paper was funded by the Slovenian Re-
search Agency research programmes No. P6-0436: Digital Humani-
ties: resources, tools, and methods (2022–2027) and No. P6-0281: 
Political History, the CLARIN ERIC ParlaMint project (https://www.cla-
rin.eu/parlamint) and the DARIAH-SI research infrastructure.
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Sklicevanje populističnih in nepopulističnih strank na javnost v 
slovenskem parlamentu
Prispevek se posveča raziskovanju vprašanja različnih oblik in odstopanj od 
parlamentarne demokracije, pri čemer kot študijski primer jemlje Slovenijo 
med letoma 1992 in 2018. Osredotoča se na osrednjo institucijo parlamen-
tarne demokracije, parlament, ter analizira delovanje poslancev oziroma nji-
hovega govora v parlamentu vse od začetka prvega parlamentarnega mandata 
do izteka leta, ko so še na voljo podatki za analizo celotnega državnozborskega 
mandata. Skladno z domnevo, da je populizem svojevrsten politični slog, ki 
vzpostavlja posebno povezavo z množicami, torej javnostjo, si prispevek zasta-
vlja vprašanje, ali so poslanci populističnih strank v primerjavi s poslanci ne-
populističnih strank v svojem govorjenju kako drugače naslavljali splošno jav-
nost. Rezultati empirične analize so pokazali, da so člani populističnih strank 
javnost naslavljaji pogosteje. Vendar je razlika med njimi in poslanci, ki so pri-
hajali iz nepopulističnih strank, izrazito majhna, kar je moč pojasniti z močjo 
parlamenta kot institucije. To opozarja na pomembnost okolja, pričakovanj in 
navad (Lebenswelt), v katerem delujejo poslanci še tako različnih si strank.
Ključne besede: politične stranke, populizem, življenjski svet, parlament, 
Slovenija