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THE PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS OF NOVEMBER 30TH, 2008 ARE ACTUALLY THE FIRST PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN ROMANIA FOLLOWING OUR COUNTRY'S ACCESSION TO THE EUROPEAN UNION IN 2007. THIS ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS THE MAIN ELECTORAL FRAUD METHODS USED BY THE POLITICAL PARTIES, BOTH DURING THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN AND DURING THE ORGANIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THESE ELECTIONS. CONCURRENTLY, IN ORDER TO HIGHLIGHT THESE ELECTORAL FRAUD METHODS, THE 2008 PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS HAVE BEEN ANALYZED IN COMPARISON WITH THOSE OF 1946, WHICH LED TO THE IDENTIFICATION OF COMMON STRATEGIES REGARDING THE MANNER IN WHICH THE ELECTORAL CAMPAIGN WAS CARRIED OUT, THE UNFOLDING OF THE ELECTION DAY, ATTEMPTS AND EVEN SUCCESSFUL MANIPULATION OF THE CITIZENS IN CHOOSING CERTAIN PARTIES OR THEIR CANDIDATES. THUS, THE PARLIAMENTARY ELECTORAL FRAUD METHODS OF NOVEMBER 30TH 2008 MANIFESTED IN VARIOUS FORMS, SOME OLDER AND SOME MORE RECENT. THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OBSERVE, THROUGH COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS, THE 2008 PARLIAMENTARY ELECTORAL FRAUD METHODS, NAMELY THE COMMON ASPECTS BETWEEN THEM AND THOSE OF NOVEMBER 19TH 1946, FROM AN ELECTION ORGANIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT POINT OF VIEW. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the mix of non-programmatic strategies used by politicians to gain voter support in contemporary Eastern Europe. We use a mixed-method design that combines survey-based experiments and qualitative research in a paired comparison of localities in Romania and Bulgaria. Our article documents that the mix of clientelistic strategies differs across localities with different turnover rates. In both Romania and Bulgaria, we find that the use of clientelistic strategies that politicise state resources is higher in localities with long-term political incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the contemporary political environment, the added value brought by leaders to the electoral performance of the parties appears to be significant and growing. However, the impact of leader evaluations on the vote choice is likely to vary from one voter to another. This article explores the influence of voter characteristics on the magnitude of leader effects in the context of the 2012 legislative elections in Romania. Five such characteristics are considered: objective political knowledge, subjective political information, party identification, political engagement, and time of voting decision. For this purpose, the paper employs data from the 2012 Romanian Election Studies (RES) three-wave panel survey. The analyses prove a significant influence of political knowledge and party identification and negligible effects of the other three voter characteristics considered. Thus, political knowledge appears to stimulate the manifestation of leader effects. Similarly, voters holding partisan ties appear to experience higher levels of personalization. The implications of these findings are discussed extensively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romanian presidential elections which were held on 2014 were characterized by political turmoil and criticism pertaining to the organization of voting, both in the country and abroad. This emphasized the necessity of revising electoral legislation in order to meet requirements of the legal certainty principle and to respond to the need for integrity and accessibility in the electoral process. This paper's objective is to evaluate Law no 370/2004 on the election of the President of Romania against international standards and to formulate proposals for the reform of the legal framework, starting from the imperfections and irregularities found during the 2014 presidential elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Strategic Universe Journal / Univers Strategic is the property of Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, Institute for Security Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The fall of Communism in 1989 has led to the re-appearance of multiparty system in Romania. For its organisation and functioning a series of decrees and laws were adopted. Multiparty system in Romanian society is both a condition and guarantee of constitutional democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates how the growing complexity of regulations regarding party funding in post-communist Romania is paralleled by practices employed by political parties in their attempt to gain increased access to state resources. Our document analysis indicate that political parties managed to exploit the weaknesses of the increasingly complex legislative framework. A cyclical process takes places: parties use the existing flaws in the legislation on party funding to indirectly obtain and exploit state resources for their (electoral) purposes, an improved law tackling those shortcomings is passed, but political parties are able to identify other flaws and use them to gain financial benefits. To make the case, we assess comparatively the evolution of legislative provisions and practices employed by political parties over two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Bucharest University Annals - Law Series is the property of CH Beck Publishing House and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our material introduces the concept of hybrid electoral area, as a distinct electoral entity set up by special territorial and administrative processes. We analyze specific cases of such spaces in Iasi and we see how the winning electoral strategies have been configured here. We provide examples of campaign activities and actions which ensured the candidates' success by simultaneously targeting both the electoral sub-spaces and the community seen as whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several poor urban areas populated by a large number of gypsies have appeared in Romania lately. The characteristics of these areas make them look like real urban ghettos. Nevertheless, their study is a sensitive subject for the academic world. The journalists' articles may be useful for researchers in order to eliminate analytical barriers. Consequently, the analysis of the Romanian urban ghettos starts with the data offered by the mass-media and focuses on the relation between the ghettos and the politics. A special part of this study concentrates on the precariousness of living in the ghettos and the attention paid to this by politicians and political parties. The ghettopolitics relation sometimes hides undesirable practices such as electoral blackmail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2012 election, which took place under exceptional political auspices, is generally considered atypical when compared to the other five post-communist local election cycles, the two reasons for this being the increased citizen ballot presence (caused by the particularity of the election period) and the specific legislature changes. Is such an approach justified? By aiming to investigate the validity of such an approach, we will retrace the history of post-communist Romanian local elections, by looking at the effective political consequences and especially at the dynamics of the electoral formulas that were employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that the electoral debates, created as another opportunity for assuring accurate and complete information to the voters and equal rights of expression and presentation of the platform to the candidates, are seen today as a mere directed spectacles. On the other hand the televisual studies have pointed out the fact that, beside the formal character of this type of confrontations, they have the merit of bringing together opposed candidates, incite discussions about political platforms and solutions between candidates and, more important, afterwards have different types of echoes into society. A fundamental point in starting this research is the premise that mass-media in general and televised debates in particular have an important role in reconfiguring public space because they provoke a sort of dialogue between actors, between citizens and between citizens and different actors. Also, the analysis of the televised debates becomes extremely important for understanding the electoral climate, but also for investigating the more complex transformations in political communication under the pressure of commercialization, commodification and tabloidization of mass-media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The elections from 1st - 2nd of June 1939, during the authoritarian monarchy, 1938-1940, emphasised habits, methods and electoral mechanisms specific to any authoritarian regimes. The Maire was the one organising the elections, mainly because he was also making the electoral lists and in charge with the train transportation of the citizens to the voting precinct; trough the telephone network, the results of the elections were communicated to the Interior Ministry, who was to be informed at any moment about the data given by the Maire and also the voting and occasional incidents occurring during the elections. The need of control above the citizen's vote represented the main mission of the local authorities during the day of the voting, precisely by the repression organs, The Police and the Constabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is dealing with Romanian electoral system from a different perspective analyzing those technical and legal components of an electoral law which are neglected in classical perspectives regarding electoral systems showing that the Government changes very often the electoral laws trying to ensure an institutional dominance over the other competitors. In other words not the electoral results are on spot but the way that drives these outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper will examine the arguments, initiatives and specific strategies that political parties in Romania use for gaining support of the Romanian communities living abroad in view of 2012 elections. In the existing EU context, the Romanian Diaspora has a huge unexplored potential which no political party can ignore. Altough we are approximately six month ahead the legislative elections, enough time for the political parties to change or introduce new themes in their political discourse according to their positioning in front of the voters, we are going to present several working hypothesis that, in our opinion, will shape the electoral strategies of political parties in order to obtain the support of Romanian abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the dynamics of electoral participation and its predictors in Romania, using both official data on turnout and post-electoral survey data. The turnout in the Romanian parliamentary elections has declined by over 50% in the last 20 years of democratic reconstruction. However, turnout decline is unevenly distributed, being more dramatic in the last decade especially in the urban areas as well as among younger cohorts of voters. The decline of turnout in parliamentary elections is also accompanied by a shift in the importance of the predictors of voting. The analyses of electoral participation and its predictors suggest that voting in the Romanian parliamentary elections has become the attribute of a minority of citizens who still feel closer to a political party, are interested in politics, trust the political institutions and leaders, ideologically place themselves at the extremes of the left-right axis, and of those who are more exposed to mobilization attempts both because they live in smaller communities in the rural areas which are more easily controlled by local political leaders and because they are part of social networks that are influenced by political parties or politicians. This is the "hard core" of a generally apathetic electorate which is unconfident in the efficacy of elections as a tool for producing social transformations, a public which is becoming less and less demanding with the politicians after the subsequent disappointments with the democratic governance after 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presented is a political survey of the country of Romania for the year 2009. It is noted that 2009 was marked by political instability and by deadlocked policy makers as president Traian Basescu and his ruling Democrat-Liberal Party became isolated from voters. A number of other events and developments are discussed including the 2009 presidential election, the degree of political corruption in the Social Democratic Party under the leadership of Mircea Geoana, and the election of members of the European Parliament.

The article presents an overview of political developments in Romania for 2008. It includes an analysis of the political motives of leading public figures, and commentary on trends in public opinion regarding the events described. Various electoral results, institutional changes, and notable issues in national politics are discussed. These include some major rulings of the Constitutional Court, and national elections, both of which led to fears of a resurgence of repressive political groups from the Communist era.

The article refers to the post-communism era beginning in 1989 and focuses on the Romanian general elections of 2008. The stability of a democracy in Romania during the transition from communism, the country's membership in the European Union, the semi-presidential status of the Romanian republic as defined in the 1991 constitution, and the expected outcome of the 2009 presidential elections are mentioned. The power of politicians Nicolae Ceauşescu, Traian Băsescu, and Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu and of the ruling National Liberal and Democrats Party are discussed.

Abstract: This article analyzes the reasons for the remarkable adaptability and electoral success of Communist successor parties in post-1990 Romania. The first part develops a three-dimensional classification scheme to identify Communist successor parties on the basis of their institutional, personnel and ideological continuity with the defunct Communist Party. The second section traces the political evolution of Communist successor parties, and argues that their remarkably strong and consistent electoral performance is primarily due to their ability to appeal to voters beyond the traditional base of East European ex-Communist parties on the left of the ideological spectrum. The final section uses survey data to suggest that the continued electoral appeal of Communist successor parties in Romania is due neither to Communist nostalgia or lack of democracy but to the complicated legacy of the Ceauşescu regime and the 1989 revolution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article looks at politics in Romania in 2006. A chart of the number of seats controlled by various political parties following the November 28, 2004, elections to the Romanian Parliament (Chamber of Deputies) is presented, including the Greater Romania Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Justice and Truth Alliance. A chart of the results of the presidential elections held on November 28, 2004, is presented, noting the number of votes won by candidates such as Adrian Nastase, Traian Basescu, and Corneliu Vadim Tudor. Members of the cabinet of Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu are also listed, including Minister of External Affairs Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, Minister of Public Administration and Interior Vasile Blaga, and Minister of National Defense Teodor Atanasiu.

Focuses on results of 2001 presidential election in Romania. Battle between an ultranationalist fanatic and an old communist; Victory of Ion Iliescu; Series of government programs by Iliescu's hand-picked prime minister, Adrian Nastase; Country's bid to enter the European Union; Romanian aversion to things Russian.