Search

Many of the present day major cities have their territory partitioned into administrative subdivisions for a wide range of local governance purposes. Partisan local elections are held for electing the politicians into public administration offices of the subdivisions, which may lead to the creation of local partisan conflicts within each unit. In this paper, I analyze the influence of this local political context on the electoral behaviors formed at the national legislative elections to see if the local political context in the subdivisions determines a lack of democratic representation by rendering the socio-spatial conflicts of the city irrelevant. I explore this on Bucharest, a large city of nearly two million, at the national legislative elections between 2000-2016. The methodology is drawn from the subfield of electoral geography, as I spatial analyse the geographic clustering of electoral behaviors in the six subdivisions of Bucharest. The results in Bucharest show the capacity of the subdivisions to influence voting decisions through the local political context when certain conditions are met.

European Parliament elections were held in Romania on 24 May 2019. The results were spectacular. PSD, the ruling party, suffered a major defeat, amidst a strong mobilization in favour of PNL and USR-PLUS, the main opposition parties. This paper is one of the first detailed attempts to understand the electoral behaviors at this contest. Voting decisions are researched through an exploratory spatial analysis on a case study of Iași, one of Romania's most important cities. Results indicate patterns of spatial polarization within the political geographic space of Iași. The paper makes contributions on issues of local politics of Iași, Romanian party politics and electoral behavior, and the special nature of European Parliament elections.

The 2000 Romanian General Elections marked the disappearance of the Romanian Democratic Convention (CDR), until then a remarkable fixture within the party system. The Convention's dissolution enabled other parties to emerge and fill in the void. This article explores these replacements at their geographical level. The historical region of Transylvania, once a stronghold for the Convention, became a favorable place for the Justice and Truth Alliance (DA) in 2004 and for the National Liberal Party (PNL) and the Democratic Liberal Party (PDL) in 2008. Using Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA), we examine the geography of party replacement in six Transylvanian counties. ESDA indicates that the party replacement process within the Romanian context has a definite and clear geographical dimension. Our study shows the need to place electoral changes in a geographic framework for a better understanding of Romanian party politics.