Type of measure

There is no policy measure focusing on promoting young people’s e-participation. There is also no act or strategy on this subject, nor has there been a public debate. This subject is not very well studied in Slovenia, and there are no guidelines as to how to demonstrate e-participation to young people, and especially how to educate them for proper use of IT (e.g., online social networks). Otherwise, non-conventional political participation (which includes e-participation, social networks, etc.) is part of the National Programme for Youth – second priority subsection: Promoting and supporting unconventional political participation of young people.

There are some projects from the organisations:

• In Slovenia, the leading role on the field of e-participation belongs to the Institute for Electronic Participation (INePA- Inštitut za elektronsko participacijo). The Institute is a professional, non-governmental and non-profit organisation, active in different areas of public policy, such as electronic participation (participation, cooperation and integration), digital democracy (electronic, internet, virtual and cybernetic democracy), electronic government, electronic administration and open doors. Furthermore, the Institute also works on different projects that specifically include youth. One of these projects is DEEP-linking Youth 2015‒2017. The core objective of this project is to explore how e-participation can foster active participation of youth in democratic life, including mapping existing youth mobility channels, developing online content and creating different analytic tools for monitoring. As mentioned on the project’s website, one of the main outcomes is the ‘Digital Dashboard’. The latter could be used by policymakers to understand the concerns of youth and to take into account their perspectives in the policy-making process.
• Because of the low level of youth political participation, the Youth Council of Slovenia prepared a project ‘Initiative.si: Youth for a Better Society’ (Pobuda.si: Mladi za boljšo družbo). The key result of the project was, on the one hand, an interactive online portal, which promotes youth participation, and on the other the portal which enables youth to pass on their initiatives for improvement of their environment and situation.

A new tool available is Parlameter. Parlameter was produced within the Institute ‘Today Is a New Day’ (Inštitut Danes je nov dan), which focuses on digital political participation, transparency and control. With analysing ballots and transcripts of appearances, it facilitates monitoring of the work of the National Assembly. User-friendly visual design and technologically advanced modular design increase the transparency of the operation of the most important democratic institutions and facilitate effective access to the decision-making process. Because of the absence of publicly available machine-readable parliamentary data, Parlameter uses the documents from the websites dz-rs.si and dvk-rs.si.

ICT tools used

There are/were some tools where youth can participate:

• the web portal ‘Initiative’ (pobuda.si) – where youth can write their recommendation to the municipality, to the country or to the EU
• the web portal ‘I recommend to the municipality’ (predlagam-občini.si)
• Student organisation of the University of Ljubljana prepared the project ‘Student, where does the shoe pinch?’ (Študent, kje pa tebe čevelj žuli?) – the purpose of the campaign was to identify the problems students encountered during the study.

Data or studies

According to the research Youth 2010, young people in 2009 were more involved in IT activities (web forums, articles on media websites, internet political forum or discussion group) compared to adults. The research, Slovenian Youth 2013, showed that 81% of Slovenian youth (aged 16–25) acquired information about politics from the Internet. According to the data of the Slovenian Youth 2018/2019 research, young people in Slovenia spend 5 or more hours on the Internet each day. 66% of youth 'often' read news/search for information on the Internet.

According to the Eurostat survey, 15% of Slovenian youth used the Internet for posting opinions (accessing or posting opinions on websites for discussing civic and political issues) from 2010‒2013. Seventy-three percent of young people in Slovenia used the Internet for interaction with public authorities in 2014, as compared to 77% in 2013, 69% in 2012 and 64% in 2011 (see the Eurostat survey). According to the Eurostat data, 10% of young (16–29 years) people in Slovenia use the Internet for civic or political participation, which remained the same since 2017. Compared to the other countries, this is 10% less than the EU average.