{"id":35991,"date":"2024-07-23T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-23T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ostro.si\/uncategorized\/stable-right-fragmented-left\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T09:05:43","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T07:05:43","slug":"stable-right-fragmented-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ostro.si\/en\/stories\/stable-right-fragmented-left\/","title":{"rendered":"Stable Right, Fragmented Left"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Prime Minister Robert Golob and Minister of Higher Education Igor Papi\u010d studied or worked in parallel at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering for over 30 years. They also collaborated on several research projects. Papi\u010d stayed in academia until his current ministerial position, while Golob first entered politics in 1998, and then the economy two years later. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This is why O\u0161tro developed the Zvezoskop<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

Collected data was also analysed by Anu\u0161ka 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. <\/p>\n

In their assessment, the information collected and verified by O\u0161tro is sufficiently objective to trace the connections between the officials. \u201cIt is clearly apparent that those who have worked together a lot in the past are now also in political contact,\u201d stated Ferligoj. <\/p>\n

The faculty as a springboard to government<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The gender ratio is 60 percent to 40 percent in favor of men.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf two people have worked together in various fields in the past, trust is likely to develop between them,\u201d said Anu\u0161ka Ferligoj. \u201cBecause of this trust, choosing a colleague in the political sphere might involve that person rather than someone without an existing relationship.\u201d <\/p>\n

Ferligoj specifically noted connections formed during the study period, which were in the data analysis shown as highly relevant.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 Papi\u010d and Golob respectively were lecturing and researching there. <\/p>\n

Among the institutions where current officials once collaborated is also RTV Slovenia. There are ten such officials, including ministers Tanja Fajon and Marjan \u0160arec. <\/p>\n

The total number of institutions listed in the Zvezoskop is 1182.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n