This study examines the Romanian Electoral Management Body (EMB), focusing on its dualistic structure. It distinguishes between the formal independence and functional independence of electoral management institutions and proposes a qualitative evaluation of the Permanent Electoral Authority (AEP) and the Central Electoral Bureau (BEC). The...
Tuesday, July 18th, 2023
Leaders, institutions, or context? Explaining local government compliance with transparency regulations in Romania
The paper proposes a contextualized approach to local government transparency and its determinants. It starts by briefly discussing the distinction between local government compliance with transparency regulations and broader/more substantial local government transparency. A context-dependent measure of local government compliance with transparency regulation is built for the Romanian case and...
Sunday, May 7th, 2023
Electoral proportionality vs. party system concentration. The 2020 Romanian local election
Voter representation based on votes cast and the degree of concentration of the party system are two variables correlated with the design of the electoral system. In general, there is an inverse relationship between proportionality and concentration: when the proportionality of the electoral system increases, the concentration of the party...
Monday, August 22nd, 2022
The invisible (under)hand – Access to information and competition in the Romanian public procurement sector
Competition in public procurement in Romania has declined sharply since 2017. Romania’s efforts toward transparency and anticorruption since becoming an EU member-state have been remarkable yet the results from over a decade of struggle do not seem to point in the direction of systemic improvement. On the contrary, over the...
Friday, July 31st, 2020
Shaping Civic Attitudes: Protests and Politics in Romania
This article looks at the contemporary upsurge of activist citizenship in Romania. Our assessment is aimed at disentangling the contextual determinants, from the agency of the movements themselves. Our research is based on primary empirical evidence collected from semi-structured interviews, surveys, news coverage, and official documents. Our findings suggest that...
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2018
Strengthening civil society beyond the ‘assistance-for-democratization’ era. Lessons from Romania
This article investigates the puzzling observation that, despite the vigorous mass protests that have taken place since 2012 and mobilized Romanian civil society against attempts to implement unpopular policies in fields such as health, environment or justice, and which have led to the fall of two cabinets, the non-governmental organization...
Friday, October 9th, 2015
Government engagement in co-operative service delivery in Romania: knowledge and acknowledgement
This paper approaches the engagement of successive Romanian governments with service delivery by third sector organisations and uses policy discourse to assess governance practices associated with collaborative service delivery. The topic is approached by a theoretically-informed qualitative analysis of policy documents spanning a decade. Results point out that the most...
Tuesday, August 13th, 2013
Risks of corruption and the management of EU funds in Romania
The suspension of EU payments in four operational programmes in 2012 showed how problematic Romania’s correct and effective management of EU funds is. Such funds aim primarily at decreasing the socio-economic disparities among EU members and support the economic convergence of less developed new EU members with their Western counterparts....
