Stable Right, Fragmented Left
Klara Škrinjar, Matej Zwitter, Maja Čakarić
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Oštro has developed a new interactive project Zvezoskop – the “Relationscope”, which allows the public to independently research the links between current ministers, secretaries of state and MPs. Of the 160 elected officials, as many as 40% were new to politics, while others were moving between politics and business.
Visualisation: Studio Mashoni
Prime Minister Robert Golob and Minister of Higher Education Igor Papič studied or worked in parallel at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering for over 30 years. They also collaborated on several research projects. Papič stayed in academia until his current ministerial position, while Golob first entered politics in 1998, and then the economy two years later.
Slovenia is a small country of two million inhabitants, where the career and life paths of political officials are tightly intertwined, whether in the institutions where they were educated, their previous employers, political parties, or their leisure time.
This is why Oštro developed the Zvezoskop project, enabling the public to independently view the links between current ministers, state secretaries and MPs, and their educational and career paths. We looked at the careers of 160 male and female politicians.
Collected data was also analysed by Anuška Ferligoj, Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the Faculty of Social Sciences, and her husband Vladimir Batagelj, Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Batagelj is the co-author of the internationally acclaimed Pajek software for large network analysis, which he has applied to the data of the Zvezoskop.
In their assessment, the information collected and verified by Oštro is sufficiently objective to trace the connections between the officials. “It is clearly apparent that those who have worked together a lot in the past are now also in political contact,” stated Ferligoj.
The faculty as a springboard to government
After the last four national elections, the Government was formed by political parties that were established before the elections, or were not previously represented in Parliament. Of the 160 officials in the Zvezoskop, as many as 40 percent had never been elected or appointed as ministers or state secretaries before.
The gender ratio is 60 percent to 40 percent in favor of men.
All data in the Zvezoskop is based on primary sources, meaning official documents and data, credible information, as well as confirmations by individual officials. If a piece of information could not be reliably timestamped, we did not include it in the database, as the period of presence in an institution is important for identifying the intersections between political office holders.
The data is presented in a way that displays which individuals are likely to have met at some institution during a given period. This can mean they worked together, or that they were engaged in different areas in the same institution and did not necessarily have direct contact.
“If two people have worked together in various fields in the past, trust is likely to develop between them,” said Anuška Ferligoj. “Because of this trust, choosing a colleague in the political sphere might involve that person rather than someone without an existing relationship.”
Ferligoj specifically noted connections formed during the study period, which were in the data analysis shown as highly relevant.
The largest number of officials, 26, attended the Faculty of Social Sciences, followed by the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Law, and the Faculty of Economics, where 18, 16, and 15 officials studied respectively.
The Faculty of Electrical Engineering also proved to be an important nexus, with five members of the Government, one secretary and two MPs associated with it. All of them, with the exception of the Minister for Digital Transformation, Emilija Stojmenova Duh, were there at the same time. The latter joined the faculty as a researcher in 2013, when Papič and Golob respectively were lecturing and researching there.
Among the institutions where current officials once collaborated is also RTV Slovenia. There are ten such officials, including ministers Tanja Fajon and Marjan Šarec.
The total number of institutions listed in the Zvezoskop is 1182.
The energy sector as an HR pool
PM Robert Golob and Minister Igor Papič were partly attending the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the same time. Papič stayed there until he took over as minister, while Golob began his foray into politics soon after completing his PhD in 1994. In 1998, he was delegated from the Ministry of Economic Affairs to be an advisor to the government of Janez Drnovšek, and then became State Secretary for Energy at the Ministry.
In 2006, he took over the management of the company Gen-I, where he was CEO until the end of 2021. During this period he was owner of three companies and director of five others. Last October, he also became the sole shareholder of Star Solar, an electricity generation company previously owned by his ex-wife.
Eight other current officials are linked to Gen-I, including Minister Matej Arčon, who was employed there in 2022, and MP Tamara Vonta, who was its media adviser at the time. Current Minister Bojan Kumer was also employed by Gen-I, as were the secretaries in the Prime Minister’s Office, Maksimiljana Polak and Danijel Levičar, who was a member of the Board of Directors and Deputy CEO, meaning Golob’s deputy.
Papič’s involvement in the economy was more modest. In 2009, he co-founded Reinhausen 2e, a company dealing with power quality. He is still a co-owner today.
The Municipality of Nova Gorica was another important networking site for the Prime Minister. Golob and Arčon were city councilors there between 2002 and 2022, during which time Arčon was also vice-mayor and mayor. When Golob was a city councilor, two current state secretaries and an MP also sat in the municipal benches. Secretary Vesna Humar was a city councilor later, from late 2022 until the end of May 2023.
The EZTS GO, a cross-border cooperation organisation based in Gorizia, Italy, founded by the municipalities of Gorizia, Nova Gorica, and Šempeter-Vrtojba, is a noted sub-network as well. Until July 2018, it was headed by Golob, followed by Arčon. At that time, Arčon’s current State Secretary Vesna Humar cooperated in the project of Nova Gorica’s candidacy for the European Capital of Culture 2025.
Display of the links in the Nova Gorica Municipality. Click image to view.
SDS members as the most interconnected group
Auška Ferligoj, who analysed the Zvezoskop’s data, pointed out that the links in the right-wing political block are much stronger than those in the left-wing one. She has observed that the left is more fragmented and the right more stable in many other studies she has been involved in.
With Vladimir Batagelj, they analysed the data with the Pajek software by creating two networks, one until the April 2022 elections and another until February 2024. They classified people into nine groups with further sub-groups.
SDS members display the most stable connections among all political office holders. At the centre of the sizable group of SDS members is the intersection of the most connected, being Janez Janša, Branko Grims, Jože Tanko, Alenka Jeraj, and Anja Bah Žibert.
According to Zvezoskop data, “old” SDS members have been working together for an average of close to 15 years. Others in the SDS network have spent nearly a third of their time together, or 5.7 years.
A matrix display of the network of government members, secretaries of state and MPs until April 2022. A darker square means a stronger link. Click on the image to open the matrix in a new window. Author: Dr. Vladimir Batagelj/Pajek
The Social Democrats are divided into two groups, whose members are more or less linked to one another. Among the more connected who have worked together for an average of nine years are Jani Prednik, Matevž Frangež, Meira Hot, Dejan Židan, Matjaž Han, and Bojana Muršič. They are also in closer contact with the SDS (mainly due to their joint work in the National Assembly), with which they have had an average of two years of cooperation.
Members of the second SD group have been working together for 1.7 years, including Melita Župevc, Tamara Vonta, Andreja Katič, Igor Šoltes, and Dominika Švarc Pipan. On average, they have worked with SDS members for six months.
In the Freedom Movement, the links between Golob, Papič, and Arčon are particularly strong.
It all stays in the public sector
We specifically analysed the impact of entering politics on the career trajectories of 93 officials who had already held their first political office before the last parliamentary elections.
Just under two-thirds of them were, among other things, civil servants before their first political office, and just under half were employed in non-managerial roles in the private sector. This was followed by private entrepreneurs (17%), managers in private companies (15%), and academics (12%). For 13% of office holders, it was not possible to collect data on work experience before entering politics.
As many as 40 percent of officials who have been in politics for a long time have exclusively held political office after entering politics. Others moved between politics, the economy and the public sector until their current mandate.
Areas where the greatest number of officials were active before their current mandate are in particular various types of government, such as local (74 officials) or legislative (60). Other common activity areas are education, culture, security and defence, media, and energy.
Zvezoskop also shows the professional profiles of political parties: comparison is made based on those politicians showing demonstrable links with the parties. All parties are dominated by professional politicians. In the Freedom Movement, an equal share of the remaining incumbents come from the private and public sectors. In the SD, the majority are from the public sector, as in the Left Party where NGOs and academics stand out. There are fewer academics in SDS than in the other parties, and fewer private entrepreneurs.