Elections and Electoral Behavior in Romania: From Local to National

Mihaela Ivanescu's book can be described as an argumentative, rigorous and convincing answer given to a central question for understanding the democratic political process in post-communist Romania: how do national and local politics articulate each other in different types of elections? To answer this question, the author analyzes the electoral behaviors of individuals, but also the regularities in the formation of voting intention, as well as the influences that different types of variables have in creating or modifying the political preferences of citizens. Ms. Ivanescu mobilized not only the empirical data provided by the literature, but proceeded to develop their own working tools (questionnaires applied) to clarify irregularities in the distribution of votes between parties and candidates highlighted nationally, at the city level, but and of Constanta county, from the dense electoral moment 2008-2009.
Throughout the chapters of the book, the author lays and lays the theoretical and methodological bases for a more detailed and pertinent exploration of the two issues that she placed at the center of her issue: on the one hand, the political disengagement of citizens manifested by electoral absenteeism, and on the other hand, the incongruity between national and local politics at the level of voting options. In the nine rounds of general, presidential and local elections organized in post-communist Romania (seven of them investigated in detail in the paper), the vote is gradually marked by three intertwined phenomena that need explanation: the accentuated electoral decommissioning of citizens, the volatility of preferences expressed from one election to another and the relative disarticulation between the options formulated simultaneously for the local elected and for the national ones, the latter feature being mainly manifest in the sometimes dramatic divergence between the local and the presidential vote.
Hence the assumed methodological pluralism of the book: voting volatility and partisan precariousness are both factors that make it impossible to naturalize in the Romanian context one of the classic explanatory models in political science of the formation and distribution of electoral preferences. All these models, carefully reviewed, inevitably introduce in the recipe for the analysis of the empirical material a form of rationality that does not seem able to capture satisfactorily the variety of criteria used by the Romanian voter.
The central hypothesis of the book - gradually transformed into a tested and confirmed thesis - is therefore that the individual voter uses at the same time and without being concerned with any command of coherence to a variable number of cries, which take into account partisan identification, but it constantly contrasts with the preference for the candidate's personality, but also with a certain ability to rank his options for specific candidates. Such a thesis may seem simultaneously predictable and vague, but it is illustrated with analytical force by the electoral behavior of citizens, willing to experience at least partially locally the choice of a candidate as a form of sympathy for his party, while such a favor is lost when the same voter formulates his decision regarding the personality and the national party. In this complicated game of mirrors that Mihaela Ivanescu tries to capture and measure, the reflection that the favorite candidate leaves on the party and the way the party potentiates the preference for a candidate are not only asymmetrical, but straightforward. incongruous. This seems to me to be, undoubtedly, the major contribution of the book to the finer understanding of the way in which the Romanian political logic of the present time was structured from the bottom up.
The analysis ultimately captures what could be called the process of "de-nationalization" of Romanian politics, which began slowly in 2001 and ended in 2008. In other words, local politics is the key to understanding how the political regime works. Romanian. Elections, parties, clientelism and bureaucracy are the four dimensions that organize reflection. The Romanian state is only a practice of the parties. They, in turn, are inseparable from the local administrative apparatus they use to consolidate, to recruit and reward members, to organize elections and to manufacture election results.
Divided voting and re-election are not necessarily control tools available to the voter. On the contrary, especially since 2008, the vote (especially the local one and only partially the national one) is almost entirely controlled by the party apparatuses able to extract it from the society. Unpredictability, as long as it exists, depends more on the ability, variable from one party to another, to form, maintain and develop networks of patronage and clientelism that produce votes. The parties exist and function in this local horizon, especially as devices for mobilization, for making even votes. And the method by which the parties carry out this seasonal operation is clientelism. The latter, on the other hand, is organized in relatively stable and, in any case, sustainable patronage networks, which manifests itself as the only local form of political life. The Romanian parties, caught at work between the state apparatuses and the society, do not have the role to represent and socialize the citizens, but to mobilize them at the polls.
They manage to do it, Mihaela Ivanescu demonstrates by reflecting on the electoral picture of Constanta in 2008 and 2009, according to a logic of asymmetric bi-personalism. In local elections, the personality of the local leader is decisive in the accumulation of votes on behalf of a particular party. Instead, the presidential election can overturn the hierarchy of votes by the opposite force of the national personality, which always seems to have the ascendancy over the local one. Is this about voter discernment? Rather, we would be dealing with two disconnected electoral situations (even when they were simultaneous, as happened until 2004), with two horizons of expectations quite distinct in the collective imagination and in its repercussions in the press. On the one hand, the horizon of real life, where the better or the different are always the enemy of the good you have become accustomed to and whose limits you know. On the other hand, the generic, fictitious and distant horizon embodied by the President of Romania. The latter is a horizon unrelated to the direct experience of citizens. Therefore, they can project at this level in complete freedom, as on a white screen, all illusions, hopes, resentments and frustrations. No obvious, concrete and immediate risks.
The revelation of this divisible, even divergent, character of the electoral choice of the citizens, often presented as an indivisible political good, probably represents the main intellectual contribution of the book to the Romanian political science. In democracies, voting is, of course, a right. But it can also be an illusion of individual freedom, Mihaela Ivanescu suggests with refinement.

Professor Daniel Barbu