Suchergebnisse

The present article brings to the fore several details, which had been either unknown, or only partially familiar to the Romanian historiographers. The author refers to academic trajectories of the 14 young Romanians (almost half originating from Bucharest or Iaşi), who obtained their PhD in political and administrative sciences at the Free University of Brussels between 1885 and 1899. Over a third of them were also doctors in law. Of the 92 PhDs in political science awarded in Brussels between 1885-1899, the Romanians were on the second position in a formal hierarchy of the students who were not of Belgian descent. The foreigners counted 51 students, and the list was dominated by the Bulgarians, who had obtained 21 diplomas, while the Japanese held a distant third place with merely 4 PhD degrees.

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 study aims to answer the question whether Christian Orthodoxy can inspire political movements. In so doing we start from the political theories of modernity where the link between Christianity and democracy is central. Our result sounds unexpected: interaction between Orthodoxy and democracy seems to not have a perspective. It is too late for it since most political movements in post-communism do not have the religious identity of their members as criterion. The situation was not different before. As an example the effort of the orthodox theologians and laymen in Romania before the outbreak of the Second World War is quoted here. Almost without an exception all focused and restricted their interest on the question of the nation. Therein we see the principal reason for the above postulated perspective of an orthodox political doctrine until now. On the European level the situation looks also no better. Even the parties, which attribute themselves the Christian values, have at present large difficulties to convey their message. It remains only to hope that the political actors rediscover the social and actively support the Christian ethics in the public area. Only so can democracy be regarded as one of the most important binding forces also under the Christians.

The paper provides the ideal-typical narrative of European integration manufactured by Romanian intellectuals and the official national Church (Greek-orthodox), that could be summarized as follows: in the realm of the spirit, Europe would have survived mainly in the East, shepherded by such intellectuals as the Romanian ones and by the spiritual legacy of the Orthodox Church; in political and economic terms, European Union is monitored according to secularist and relativist guidelines by the bureaucracy in Brussels. Whatever the latter, together with their Romanian counterparts, may have realized in the course of European enlargement is of little concern for the former. Both the Church and the mainstream intellectuals are engaged now in an operation that should have defined them long before the fall of state socialism: to boost intellectual non-conformity with respect to the political dominant discourse as a way of refusing the debate by taking it seriously. And they do it by means of the same narrative device that kept them silent under communism: they tell the story of the prevalence of culture and the spiritual over everything political.

It is important to study the decentralized government's bases for the current period of Moldova's development, to develop its conceptual bases and to create a theoretical model of decentralization which would be most acceptable for existing realities and would produce the expected results following the consistent introduction in daily practice.
An issue which decentralization of public power depends very much and should be considered as a priority is the creation of a favourable normative and institutional framework to decentralization process.
Although the Parliament of Moldova approved the National Decentralization Strategy, in its practical realization there are still many inconsistencies and shortcomings.

Public access to accurate and reliable information is vital for democracies and the media play a key role in informing citizens about the political process. While a large body of research shows that media exposure influences electoral behavior, less is known about the factors that shape people's propensity to actively search information about politics in the media. Based on explanatory models of political participation and using public opinion survey data, the results show that material endowments and education along with motivational variables largely explain why some people are more prone to seek political information in the media. The results illustrate the importance of defining media exposure to political messages as a form of cognitive involvement in politics as this analytical strategy provides valuable insights into the socio-economic inequalities that bias public access to information.