Suchergebnisse

The article investigates the political mechanisms specific to contemporary Romanian politics and political parties, as well as those social representations related to gender roles and the
definition of family that have contributed to maintaining a low level of women participation in
Romanian politics after 1989. In a first part, it sets the conceptual context through a review of the
main theoretical approaches for the political representation of women, with an emphasis on
gender studies' cognitive dimension. Second, it connects a quantitative evaluation of women's
presence in the Romanian post communist parliament with a qualitative analysis of public (i.e.
mass media) discourse of the rejected legislative proposal to introduce gender quotas in various
political and social processes. The author finds that, beyond the dynamics of political elites'
recruitment and the functioning of the political "game", the ideological options and social
representations that emphasize the differences between men and women, as well the central role
of family in building gender roles play an essential part in maintaining a low number of women
within the Parliament.

Pierre Manent is viewed as a French thinker that develops in modern times the liberal tradition of political thinking. One of the most important issues of Manent's thinking that was not enough underlined it is the relationship between religion an politics and how this evolved from the beginning of Christianity until the main consequences of modernity. Manent view on religion and politics is the core of this paper analysis. The main contributions of Manent, such as Naissances de la politique moderne. Machiavel, Hobbes, Rousseau (1977), Histoire intellectuelle du lib.ralisme (1987) La cit. de l'homme (1994), Cours familier de philosophie politique (2001), La raison des nations. R.flections sur la d.mocratie en Europe (2006) are analyzed from this perspective. Our conclusion is that in the way Manent deals with the relationship between politics and religion there are some constants that may be found in all his work. These are: the relationship between the Church and the different forms of political organization in Europe (Civitas, Imperium, monarchy); the fact that Christianity is one of the few current relevant concepts for political, due to the failure of totalitarian ideologies; the idea that secularization in Europe is not irreversible; we live in "an age of separations", and Church-State is one of these separations; we witness the religion transformation process and the .tat la.que cannot survive to .tat-nation; the role of Islam in modern societies and his perpetual finding of a political form; the relationship between Judaism, state and nation; the issue of the Christian identity of Europe.

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.

By analyzing the parliamentary debates of 1866-1867 on foreigners' (notably Jews) requests for naturalization and property rights, this article tries to identify the parliamentarians' answers to the following questions: On what grounds were foreigners accepted as Romanian citizens? How did the parliamentarians define the foreigner? What was required from a foreigner in order to become a citizen? The overall objective is to identify some major themes that preoccupied the representatives of the nation, circumscribed around the primordial character of the "union" and of "nationality", with a special focus on the solutions proposed by the liberals. The argument is that the Parliament, by its vote, instead of granting citizenship rights, merely established the conditions according to which one could become a Romanian. In other words, the Romanian legislators considered it to be of outmost importance to recognize the quality of being a Romanian, that is, a member of an ethnic body, and not to define citizenship as a legal membership. "To be a Romanian" was more of an ethnic belonging, a "given", than citizenship or civic loyalty, defined through political and civic rights. It seems that citizenship was crushed by the primordial character of ethnic loyalty and by the weight of the state as expression and guarantor of the Romanian nation. In engaging the parliamentary debates about naturalization, the article attempts, first, to draw more nuanced conclusions about the lately much-debated character of citizenship in Romania and Eastern Europe during the mid-19th century. And second, such an analysis may provide a better understanding of the nature of political representation during the same period.

The article takes issue with the deeply entrenched historical conception about the shaping of social policies in pre-communist Romania, which indicates socialist politics and socialist-enlisted worker trade-unionism as the only significant agents of change, also depicting the non-socialist political forces of the time as participating to the process by merely employing the strategy of stern resistance and piecemeal concessions. The alternative view offered stresses the pivotal roles performed in the context by the ideological trend of socially-minded liberalism, by the movements of professional representation with petty entrepreneurial and white-collar constituencies and by the corporatist design for the representation of professional interests. The successive stages of the inquiry leading to the formulation of such interpretative theses - and inaugurated as a research on the relation between fascist modernism and the corporatist vision of rapid economic growth under an authoritarian political cover in the local milieu - are disclosed all throughout.