ABSTRACT
This chapter puts an emphasis on the essential features of the local electoral systems that produce different political outputs compared to those on the national level. For a relatively small country, Slovenia boasts a rich array of electoral peculiarities. During the previous two decades, we have observed an unprecedented decline of the nationally well-established political parties and an unhindered victorious march of small local political parties and highly heterogeneous nonpartisan lists and candidates. Furthermore, we not only highlight the most visible characteristics of local executive leaders that are rather specific to Slovenian local self-government, that is, nonpartisanship and reelection patterns but also put additional emphasis on the increasing role of female local representatives and mechanisms of positive discrimination toward minorities.
