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Paper
The Changing Status of Protest Participation
by Cristina Niculescu,
One of the main evolutions entailed by the fall of the communist regimes in Central and South-Eastern Europe is the raise of a functional civil society aimed at influencing and holding the new political leadership accountable. The focus of this paper is on the citizen participation as a mean of interaction with the political system, and especially on the changing boundary between conventional and unconventional participation and on providing arguments in favour of separating the protest participation from the classical unconventional typology. I use two theoretical approaches, one comparative analysis of the various definitions and typologies of citizen participation and a second following the social changes theories that influenced the criteria of distinguishing between the participation forms: the social and cognitive mobilization processes, the postmodernization and postmaterialism theories and the mobilization strategies of social actors. My analysis is exploring the main characteristics of citizen participation in Romania as reflected in the types of associations and organizations the citizens adhere to, the activities they chose to develop within these social groups, the effective implication of the citizens in solving various problems and the perceived sense of efficacy attached to several ways of influencing the political system. The data source is the “Civil Society Development on the Black Sea: Social Involvement in the Republic of Moldova and Romania” project developed as part of the Black and Caspian Sea Collaborative Research Program. The main findings of my research support the separation of protest participation forms from the unconventional ways of participation and highlight the citizen participation changes drawn by the latest social change processes.
published in Vol 3 - No 1 - 2003 // Reinventing Social Sciences
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ABSTRACT
The Political Science production after 1989 is, not surprisingly, quite poor. Only five authors published books abroad, though many more chapters in edited books and journals by Western publishers were authored by Romanians. Nuclei of empirical research started to develop in Cluj and Bucharest. New centers, as Iasi and Timisoara, have stepped in more recently.... »
FOCUS
Prior to 1945 Romania had a well-developed sociological school, well related to Western Europe and enjoying a good reputation in Romania. Among the many endeavors of this school the four-volumes Romanian Encyclopedia commissioned by the Royal Foundation remains the main source of data for pre-Communist Romania. During early Communist years sociologists had to choose between... »
The quantity and quality of Romanian historians work improved seriously after the fall of communism. Altough the new generation of historians, historians that borrowed the know-how from the West, have to face many obstacles, the battle is not lost already. The battle between those who want to revive the “grand-narrative” from communism and those who... »
Neagu Djuvara is a professional diplomate, a historian of South-Eastern Europe and an opinion leader. He left Romania shortly before the advent of Communism, and returned after 1989 as a senior scholar, who spent most of his career years in the West. His intervention in this symposium is rooted in his own experience. Djuvara claims... »
Due to the subservience to the previous regime, many professional historians were considered untrustworthy and discredited as interpreters of past and present in the former eastern communist countries. Their evolution after glasnost and perestroika contained some important steps. First, they challenged the communist political taboos under glasnost’ and deconstructed the communist political myths and historical... »
The paper draws on a report on the state of the art in East European political science based on country reports. It serves as a source for those interested in the degree of development and sophistication of the political science in EU accession countries, but stands also as a scientific contribution in its own right.... »
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