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Our paper examines the influence of the historical legacy regarding the impact of the border of the former Habsburg Empire, the former political membership of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR), and perceptions about the communist past - in understanding the current tolerance of bribery in Romania, more than 25 years after the fall of communism. We started from an existing background suggesting that in the aftermath of the fall of communism, Romania underwent significant socio-economic changes, with persisting regional disparities accentuated by historical and cultural legacies. Using representative data from the European and World Values Survey joint dataset v.2.0, other relevant sources (Public Opinion Barometer from 2000 and 2007), variable selection and analysis methods based on DK/NA value treatment, binary derivations, the LASSO pack in Stata 17.0 together with different types of regressions including OLS, binary and ordered logistic ones, cross-validations both random and based on wellestablished criteria (mixed-effects modeling), and collinearity removal techniques based on maximum accepted values of the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF), the results highlight that respondents from certain Romanian macro-regions that experienced higher levels of membership in the PCR and positive views about communism are less likely to be tolerant of bribery. It appears that if the region of residence was part of the former Habsburg Empire, current intentions for bribery are higher. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the propensity to bribe is negatively affected by current macro elements, such as higher crime levels, material deprivation, urban connectivity or lower levels of migration abroad, and left-wing voting preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fertility in Romania dropped rapidly after the collapse of the communist rule, placing the country among those with low fertility rates, and started to grow again after the year 2014. The paper approaches the dynamic of fertility in Romania, focusing on the period when fertility grew again. Using data from the semi-panel conducted by World Values Survey Romanian in 2012 and 2018, the paper looks at the changes in fertility in Romania based on micro-level data and studying trends in cohort fertility among women of fertile age and the drivers of these changes. The cohort analysis indicates that birth postponement is the main mechanism leading to the growth in fertility in Romania in the past decade. At the same time, the results provide support to the uncertainty explanation, the fear of job losing having negative impact on the number of children born by a woman. Altogether, the results suggest that Romania does not yet reach the second gender revolution, that has gender equality in private sphere at its core, fertility decision relying on traditional factors such as economic uncertainty and patriarchal model, with the male partner being the main breadwinner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to achieve their functional purpose – that of organizing the urban landscape and helping locating people and geographical objectives through an efficient addressing system – street names are bound to remain stable spatial landmarks. On the other hand, street names are also semiotic devices of signifying space with the political and commemorative agenda of the ruling power. This latter characteristic renders them vulnerable to successive renaming following important power-shifts and especially regime changes. What happens when the ideological imperative of politicizing the street nomenclature undermines its functional requirement of providing spatial orientation through extensive renaming? Such a tensional situation is examined in the case of postwar Sibiu between 1945 and 1948, when the city endured a thorough redefinition of its toponymy under the political regime of communist “popular democracy” in Romania. The paper quantifies the scope of toponymic revision and then evaluates the content of these street name changes in terms of three major concepts: class, ethnicity, and gender. Grounded on the results of this analysis, the paper advances the notion of “mercurial street names”. It concludes by arguing that such a concept should complement the existing metaphoricity underpinning the scholarship in place-name studies, which draw on “text”, “discourse”, and “palimpsest” to conceive of the processes of street (re)naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]