Sergiu Gherghina

Practice and payment: Determinants of candidate list position in European Parliament elections

This article fills a gap in the literature by explaining list composition and placement of candidates in closed PR (proportional representation) settings. Focusing on the case of Romania in the European elections of June 2009, we rely on an original data set including the sociodemographics, career history and wealth of all 215 candidates from the Romanian parties’ parliamentary lists. The results of our rank-ordered logistic regression indicate that at both the national and the party level the political competitors favour previous political experience and wealth of the candidates in establishing their final list order. Marginal effects of support from successful local branches, gender, age and education are also visible for various political parties.

Policy agendas and births and deaths of political parties

The standard model of political party density emphasizing the interaction of social cleavages and district magnitude (M) is incomplete in accounting for number of parties in cases of high values of M in an arbitrary way. We explore an alternative model for such cases emphasizing the slack in the issue agenda available to parties with which to construct viable identities or niches they can employ to mobilize cognitively-limited voters. The model is tested with time series data and event history analysis on the sizes of the public policy agenda and the political party system in the Netherlands, an extreme case of large district magnitude given its single national district. Change in the slack of the issue agenda influences the births and deaths of political parties, a result that may also have implications for cases of lower district magnitude.

Determinants of legislative voting loyalty under different electoral systems: Evidence from Romania

Previous research has found mixed evidence regarding the change of parliamentary voting behaviour following electoral reforms. But scholars have not analysed whether the mechanisms by which voting loyalty is elicited matter differently in such cases. Our article fills this gap by investigating the individual variation in voting loyalty across two legislative terms, using a sample of 26 high-stakes roll-call votes. Romania constitutes an ideal setting for such a study due to its recent shift from closed-list proportional representation to single-member districts. Multivariate ordinary least squares models (including all Members of Parliament and including only incumbents) test for the effect of parliamentary experience, party membership duration, parliamentary office, party hopping and district magnitude, while also accounting for demotion and a number of socio-demographic controls. Results indicate that socialisation is less important for Members of Parliament’s voting behaviour after reform, whereas signalling through voting dissent prior to party switching becomes more relevant.

The Failure of Cohabitation: Explaining the 2007 and 2012 Institutional Crises in Romania

Built on concurrent claims of legitimacy, the semi-presidential constitutional framework is prone to conflicts between the office holders. Cohabitation is a particular instance in which the president’s party is not represented in government and he has to share executive power with a prime minister. Instead of producing a flexible dual-authority structure within the executive, cohabitation has always tended to generate institutional crises in Romania, ending with the impeachment of the president (2007 and 2012). This article identifies a combination of four factors leading to this outcome: legislative ambiguity, the composition of the legislature, the absence of external pressures, and the leaders’ personality.

Keeping the Doors Closed: Leadership Selection in Post-Communist Romania

This article is the first systematic exploration of the leadership selection process in the Romanian party system. We use process-tracing and qualitative tools, using data from party statutes and documents of the national conventions. We focus on the parliamentary political parties throughout the entire post-communist period. The analysis shows that nothing has changed at the level of centralization of decision, and inclusiveness with the members’ involvement remaining marginal in all parties. The competitiveness of the internal elections presents a more diverse and dynamic picture. We propose a novel typology for cross-case comparisons that illustrates the association between informal decentralization and increased competitiveness. Second, we advance explanations for the persistence of the “exclusiveness” status quo that take into account intraorganizational, institutional, and exogenous factors.

Explaining Ethnic Mobilisation in Post-Communist Countries

Abstract The complex dynamics of inter-ethnic relations in post-communist countries leads to a puzzle: why do some ethnic minorities mobilise to obtain political representation whereas others do not? We use qualitative comparative analysis to capture complex causal patterns explaining the formation of ethnic parties and to analyse the combined effect of social, economic and political variables. Our article bridges a significant gap in the existing literature that usually focuses on simple explanations for the existence of ethnic parties. The analysis reveals that the political mobilisation of ethnic minorities is explained by institutional elements often underemphasised in existing theories and research.

When voter loyalty fails: party performance and corruption in Bulgaria and Romania

This article identifies the determinants of party loyalty while making a distinction between government and opposition voters within an electoral cycle in the two most recent European Union members (Bulgaria and Romania). Both countries are characterized by the perception of widespread corruption and a general distrust of politicians that are likely to hinder the development of strong ties between citizens and parties. We test the explanatory potential of both traditional and revisionist theories of partisanship, suggesting that perceptions of corruption should be treated as equal to evaluations of actual performance. The statistical analysis of comparative study of electoral systems survey data emphasizes the salience of party performance evaluations for party loyalty. Corruption perceptions are significant predictors of loyalty in the Bulgarian case. Voters in both countries assess critically the performance of their preferred party whether it was part of the government or in opposition. A significant difference arises between government and opposition voters with regard to the predictive potential of identification conceptualized as closeness to a party.

Why look back? Citizens' attitudes toward the Communist Regime in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine

Nostalgia for the communist past originates in positive evaluations of communist political and economic systems and in identification with the Soviet Union. It is peoples socialization in a particular political culture and identity, rather than their negative feelings toward the current regime and its performance, that explains this phenomenon. The same factors operate in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, irrespective of country-specific developments.

State Resources and Pocket Money: Shortcuts for Party Funding in Romania

This paper is the first systematic attempt to map the evolution of legal regulations concerning campaign finance in post-communist Romania and to link them with corruption practices parties have been engaged in, over the last decade. Our document analysis reveals a general increase in the complexity of the legal framework regulating campaign spending with a positive impact on reducing corruption. Still, many flaws remain which have been intensely exploited by the political parties. Using empirical data, we make an attempt to illustrate the different ways in which the Romanian parties have developed tools to indirectly obtain (and use) state resources for their own electoral purposes. These practices include: partisan tailored transfers of money from the government to own constituencies prior to elections; relying on large-scale patronage to reward party sponsors and activists; as well as making state agencies contribute indirectly to campaign funds under the guise of innocent workshops.

Does government performance matter? Electoral support for incumbents in six post-communist countries

For two decades, the Central and Eastern European party politics has been characterized by the widespread inability of parties to secure stable political support (reflected in high levels of electoral volatility) to allow their presence in government for consecutive terms. This paper investigates the factors that trigger support for incumbent parties in post-communist countries. In doing so, it examines the effect of individual evaluations at the systemic level (i.e. satisfaction with democracy, government activity), partisan attachment (i.e. preference), and objective indicators of individual economic success (i.e. the level of income) on the vote for incumbents. This cross-national analysis is conducted at the individual-level in six post-communist countries chosen on the basis of the most similar system design. The study uses data from election surveys at two different moments in time (mid-1990s and the first elections of the 2000s) and combines bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses. The results indicate that partisanship and positive evaluations of the government explain most of the vote for incumbents. Apart from these visible patterns, there are some other valuable results in specific countries understandable solely within the larger domestic political context.