The Not-So-Curious Case of Low Political Participation in Romania

Despite the progress registered by the Romanian political culture, the democratic balance remains fragile due to the low participation of citizens to the associative life and political decision, and in the same time, one can't yet rely on the fact that political actors position themselves impersonally towards the formal institutional practice. Romanian democracy frequently encounters challenges coming from the political actors – who tend to adjust the functioning mode of the consecrated democratic institutions and to treat rather personally the institutional processes. Nevertheless, during the past years, the Romanian democracy consumes itself on redefining the mode in which individuals exercise their citizen quality through political participation. Considering all the above, in the last two years, in Romania, we witnessed an increase of the citizens' political participation in the form of protests and ballot absenteeism, in the detriment of other forms of political participation. The protests, as social happenings, are already turning into social practice, although quite late in time, 24 years after the anticommunist Romanian revolution. In addition, the absenteeism is promoted with the occasion of electoral processes both by political and nongovernmental actors and by opinion leaders. Is Romania subscribing to a new European trend in what ballot absenteeism is concerned, while participating to protests? Are these the newest and the most notable elements in the grid of a consolidated democracy? Under what circumstances is the ballot absenteeism corroborated with the participation to protests contributing to the quality of democracy? Are there also other forms of political participation which could determine politicians to accept that the only legitimate preferences within the democratic institutional system are the citizens' and that consequently the governing should be tailored to their interests? The present paper analyses, in a first stage, the nature of political participation, its forms and instruments as well as the efficiency of their relation. Secondly, it aims at presenting a more substantial model for political participation, which could contribute to the change of perception in reference to the success of democracy.

Journal of Identity and Migration Studies, 2016

A frequent finding in the political behavior literature is that citizens from Central and Eastern Europe participate less in politics than their western neighbors. While political institutions have democratized and consolidated in some of these countries (i.e. the new EU member states), overall civic and political activism of citizens from the former communist states knows an obvious setback. This article focuses on Romania and traces the sources of political disengagement to the problems of post-communist transition in this country. The findings reveal that public expectations during the transition processes (i.e. demand side) have largely diverged from the perceived democratic performance of political authorities (i.e. supply side). Thus, the paper identifies widespread disappointments with the perceived outcomes of the political process as a key source of political alienation in post-communist Romania. Pervasive symptoms of political alienation in this country include feelings of political exclusion, helplessness and political ineffectiveness, distrust of politicians and political institutions, lack of interest in politics and the perception of politics as irrelevant to people's lives. All these further hinder citizen participation in the democratic process.

For Romania, the 90's have been the decade of transition to a democratic political system (with everything it implies: more parties, free elections, the separation of powers, rights and political freedoms etc.). But has taking this institutional model also lead to acquiring the underlying values that support it? How far has Romania come on the road to a participative democracy, to a society that has a strong civic culture, as defined by classical authors such as Almond and Verba? How many of the traits of social capital, as defined by Putnam, can be found in the post-revolutionary public space? We knew, from research, that this democratic system was desirable (there is no need to enumerate the many research papers, in particular Euro-barometer surveys, which referred to Romanians' support for democracy, rule of law and economic freedom). But beyond the rhetoric, which was and is, in fact, the real situation? If we take the statements into account, Romanians are participative...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013

In January 2012, in several cities of Romania, people turned out to streets to protest. The protests were linked to the wave of movements such as the Indignados or Occupy Wall Street. The students were especially visible among protesters. In this paper we evaluate who are the Romanians who take an active role in political life and what motivates them. Following several studies on political participation and protest, we assert that at the individual level the protests express their distrust of the political system that translates into engaging in demonstrations. Online activism accelerates the felling of shared distrust of institutions, motivating youth to engage in protest participation although the effects might be moderate. The hypotheses are tested with data from a general survey on participation in 2012 and a student survey from October 2012. We find that gender, distrust in institutions and family income influence protest behavior. Time spent online has a negative effect on protest engagement and online activism increases protesting.

2005

Civil society has proven outstanding capacities of involvement in 2004 general elections in Romania, and put a remarkable pressure on the political society. This paper aims to discuss the consequences of such involvement for both the political and civil society. We also investigate the conditions that have favoured a successful challenge of the main political actors by the most visible civic advocacy organizations. Further, we search how far can go an actor from the civil society into the lands of the political society. In the end, we hang in a balance the achievements and the failures of the civil society active involvement in the game of elections. 1.1. Civil society – general considerations Twenty five years ago civil society began to attract the spotlights of international and regional (from Eastern Europe) specialists and governments. It was more and more clear that civil society has the capacity to promote interests and ideas different from the official ones in totalitarian or...

Partecipazione e Conflitto, 2019

Since 2011, protests in post-communist Romania have changed their goals. Protesters claim to guard fundamental values of democracy such as the rule of law and fair representation and to rise against institutions crippled by corruption. In similar fashion to the 1989 revolution and the early 1990s protests, students have assumed an active role in these events. They took to the streets in Bucharest, Cluj, Ia?i and Timi?oara, the country's four largest cities, and elsewhere. Over the same period, social media has proven essential for the gathering of information, for coordinating collective action and expressing the young protesters' identity. Yet recent research (Badescu and Sum 2018) canvasses a gloomy picture of Romanian youth, said to have an eroded democratic profile. This situation is not unique. In Hungary, age and the display of authoritarian attitudes are inversely related, unlike in Poland (Fesnic 2015). Eastern Europeans might have finally rejected the remnants of th...

For several weeks in early February 2017, dozens of Romanian cities were rocked by the biggest protests in the country’s recent democratic history. Even small towns, usually dormant, had their own protesters present in the central squares. The peak protests were in Bucharest, with some 200,000 people taking the streets

The present article analyzes the new culture of protest in Romania, a type of engagement we define as recreative activism. During the past years, young and culturally-inclined citizens started demanding more and more to have a share in the political process. To explain the novelty of this phenomenon, we argue that patterns of cultural consumption in the scene contributed to the spiral of ever-increasing participation in protests throughout the past six years, mainly drawing on in-depth interviews with activists and adherents of the Romanian alternative scene. This data was further supplemented by inferences derived from participative observation and content analysis. Three main protest waves were analyzed and critically put in context: the Rosia Montana (2013), Colectiv (2015), and OUG 13 (2017) protests. Our main findings are that recreative activism has its roots in the concomitance of cultural consumption and noninstitutionalized political participation, as well as in a certain disenchantment of protest participants with post-communist politics. Further, recreative activism is characteristic for nonconventional political involvement, which requires less commitment than classic activism and is less influenced by ideologies. Keywords: Social Movements, Political Participation, Activism, Protests, Scene, Culture and Protest, Eastern Europe, Romania

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2019

After Romania’s most recent mass mobilizations, some activists chose to lie low or form civic networks, but others became directly involved in politics, helping to reshape the political landscape.