An Analysis of Winning Campaigns in Urban Municipalities in 2006 Local Elections

Abstract

The study of electoral campaigns is nowadays one of the very topical and popular themes in the field of the scientific-research work. Electoral campaigns can be defined in several ways and from several points of view. In this paper, a campaign is understood as a set of diverse activities performed to influence the electoral result. These activities can be studied according to the political-system, time-space, organisational and instrumental dimensions of their performance. The key purpose of the paper is to analyse and typologise the features of electoral campaigns of today's urban municipality mayors in Slovenia during their standing as candidates in local elections in 2006. By using various methodological and statistical approaches and tools, it was found out in the analysed cases that electoral campaigns were an important part of the electoral process and that, according to planning features and implementing plans, they were very specific in all the studied municipalities. Because of this, the campaigns in the studied elections were characterised as particular and highly localised. Despite these particularities, four different types of campaigns were highlighted according to the groups of similar features: a) traditional campaigns; b) charismatic candidate campaigns; c) modern local campaigns and d) an intense campaign mosaic. Regardless of the particularities of the campaign activities and processes, it turned out that they played an important role at the local level of political activity.
 
 Key words: • electoral campaign • local elections • urban municipality • mayor • type • Slovenia

Evolution of manifestos in a developing parliamentary democracy with proportional representation and multiparty coalition governments

“…In its first quarter century of democracy, Slovenia has maintained a proportional parliamentary electoral system, with a 3.3% and 4% threshold 5 ; in practice, 7 or 8 of about 20 competing parties or party lists have entered the national parliament and, on average, four have formed a coalition government. Slovenia has most often been described as a stable younger democracy with a near-polarized pluralistic party system (at least in terms of the high number of registered parties, the high number of parties represented in parliament, the relatively evenly distributed shares of votes and seats and the perceived ideological differences between parties), with one or two strong parties at the centre (Fink-Hafner, 2006; Fortin, 2010; Kustec Lipicer et al, 2011; Sartori, 1976). The development of the party system and party divisions can be characterized by the lack of clear-cut ideological shifts, where no electoral engineering has been imposed and broad coalition strategies are favoured (Fink-Hafner, 2006).…”

“…The increasing variety of policy positions is manifested in the growing variety of MARPOR codes within domains 7 and on the decreasing number of uncoded sentences, as well as on the general impressions of authors/coders, recorded after reading/coding of manifestos. On that basis, it seems reasonable to suggest that increasing length reflects the need for programmes to address more issues as the complexity of society – including the complexity of political debate – increases (Kustec Lipicer and Kropivnik, 2011; Kustec Lipicer et al, 2011; Zajc et. al., 2012).…”

“…In semi-structured interviews (Kustec Lipicer et al, 2011), editors of TV electoral debates at Slovenia’s two leading TV stations (public broadcaster Radio Television Slovenia [RTV SLO] and the biggest commercial broadcaster, Pop TV) dismissed electoral programmes as boring, useless, unattractive, self-satisfied and empty contributions that are of little media interest. 12 Consequently, TV debates have been oriented towards scandals that were essentially unrelated to manifesto issues.…”

“… 4. Kustec Lipicer and Kropivnik (2011), Kropivnik (2013), Kropivnik and Kustec Lipicer (2015), Kustec Lipicer et al (2011) and Zajc et al (2012). …”

“… 9. Grass-roots campaign managers of major political parties shared the opinion that electoral programmes had been important primarily for the party itself, especially for organizers of the electoral campaigns and for the parties’ own internal ‘business’ rather than for public use (Kustec Lipicer et al, 2011). …”