Referencing the Public by Populist and Non-populist Parties in the Slovene Parliament

The present moment raises many questions about the workings and resilience of parliamentary democracy in Western-type democracies, including the former 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 parliament, 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 populist 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.