Regional Elections in Romania: Party System Change Versus Second-Order Election Effects

The term regional election may sound a bit awkward in the context of Romania, because the eight territorial divisions of the country which are regularly called regions do not have any elected bodies or competences, despite a debate that has been on the agenda for years concerning this issue. Thus, when it comes to sub-national level of government, the administrative level of the counties is the appropriate one to be considered, even if these administrative units hardly resemble the regions of Western Europe. Romania is divided into 41 counties (plus the capital Bucharest, a city with special status), which lack legislative powers, their competences being only administrative and regulatory. Despite this, the elections for the county councils (and since 2008 for county council presidents), have traditionally been highly politicized and the penetration of the main actors of the national party system has been very pronounced. The reasons for this are twofold. First, the county-level elections, usually held in early summer, are regarded as the main rehearsal before the parliamentary elections that take place in the fall of the same year, providing a good opportunity for the parties to test new strategies, such as forging or terminating electoral alliances. Second, since the beginning of Romania's EU accession process, the stakes of these elections became even higher due to the increased availability of European and national budget funds to be spent by the elected administrations of the counties.

The aim of this paper is to employ the framework of regional elections elaborated by A. Schakel and already tested in the case of various Western European democracies to the five county-level elections that took place in Romania between 1996 and 2012. The main concern of this framework are second-order election effects, which can be grasped by two features of the election outcomes: turnout figures, and the congruence between voting patterns at the regional and national elections in the same territorial units. The evidence from Romania is mixed in this respect. Concerning vote congruence, opposition parties indeed tend to perform better at the county elections than at the preceding national ones, while governing parties tend to lose, which is indicative of a second-order effect. However, the turnout figures reveal an equivocal picture, as participation at the parliamentary elections is sometimes lower than at the county elections. This, however, is also related to the fact that in Romania presidential elections have been traditionally perceived as most salient by the electorate, so since they are not held together with the parliamentary elections, turnout at the latter type of voting plummeted. Finally, the results indicative of second-order effects have to be evaluated not only against the preceding parliamentary elections, but also against the subsequent ones, which are much closer in time. Such a comparison sheds light on the fact that some of the effects regarded as second order basically persist until the next parliamentary elections and are the result of genuine shifts in the party system rather than of mere second-orderness.