Suchergebnisse

The Post-communist party systems are often presented as extremely fragmentised and the political parties which emerged after the break down of communism are characterised by their blurred link with the civil society, by weak membership structures and a strong tendency to wards the colonization of the state. The mainstream literature considers, in the case of the new democracies, the existence of a strong tendency towards the emergence of a centralisation of power at the level of party leadership which describes both the party creation and party development phases. Nevertheless, at the level of the empirical studies little attention has been paid to the analysis of party organizations and their internal articulation of power. In this context, the study aims at providing a general image of the party organisational features during the party institutionalisation process in a particular case: the post-communist Romania. The paper explores the main characteristics of the party on the ground, party in central office and party in public office components of the main Romanian political parties and the relationship established between them. The conclusions of the study emphasize the sui generis features of the Romanian political party development process which favours an unexpected reinforcement of the local party organisations and the emergence of linkage mechanisms between different party layers.

The political regime change which occurred in Romania elicited a process of the emergence of new political elites and the application of new patterns in the functioning of the political institutions. Therefore, the governmental instability that characterizes the post-communist period has often been perceived as an effect of the democratization process. Embracing a comparative stance (between the interwar and the post-communist cabinets), the article challenges the idea of a governmental exceptionalism after 1989. Focusing on different patterns of appointment and circulation of the ministerial actors, the paper emphasizes the existence of several elements of convergence with regard to the governmental instability and the volatility of personnel. The paper comprises four sections: after a brief analysis of different factors allowing the construction of a valid comparison between the interwar period and the post-communism, the second part scrutinizes the volatility of the ministerial actors. Thirdly, the paper examines the process of elites' reproduction in executive portfolios and consequently the accumulation of executive experience. The last section of the article underlines the limits of this stabilization process, which is founded on a politics of elite reproduction in governmental offices.

The study focuses on the functioning of the post-Communist Romanian cabinets from the perspective of the behavior of high-level government actors: ministers and state secretaries. The study underlines the empowerment of the executive decision on vertical axis, as well as role of the institutional logic in the formation of the cohesion networks among political actors. The insertion of governmental actors in these networks, on the basis of a coincidence of the institutional trajectories, lessen the instability of the governmental personnel and ensures a continuity of the decision-making process forged on the principle of the accumulation of executive experience. The study thus employs a two-fold approach. In a first instance, the author investigates personnel reshuffles, as a measure of personnel instability; the study also performs a quantitative analysis on the reproduction of political actors in executive functions. The second part of the article scrutinizes the effects generated by the personnel's dynamics on the decision-making procedures and the strategies adopted in order to lessen the discontinuities produced by the governmental actors' fluidity.