Suchergebnisse

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.

This article is based on three hypotheses. First, the legal requirements for
establishing political parties in Romania are among the most restrictive in Europe.
Second, electoral participation decreased globaly during the last two decades;
however, when a party succeeded in registering and endorsed a non-ideological
position, the electoral participation slightly increased; so, if the legal requirements
will be relaxed, new parties might emerge and a greater participation to the
elections might be taken into consideration. Third, the current legal procedure
for registering political parties contradicts the constitutional provisions on the
freedom of association and the right to be elected. In the light of this findings, the
article suggest a revision of the current legislation.

This article tests if the democratization process in Central and Eastern Europe
coincides with a decrease in number of invalid votes. Using descriptive
statistics, we seek for evidence from 67 elections in ten countries from the
regions during the period 1990-2012. By the beginning of the 2000s, ten years
after the breakdown of communist regime, the percentages of invalid votes
in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe reached levels comparable to
those of the Western European democracies. However, significant differences
between regions and countries endure. This article adds to the literature by
being the first to inquire into the subject of invalid votes in the Central and
Eastern Europe.