Post-communist Romania Research Articles

Land reform catalysts of capitalism and communism: 150 years of agricultural change in Romania

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of historical Romanian agricultural changes from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, focusing on the main land reforms and their effects on land ownership patterns, spatial disparities and their consequences on individual farms. The study follows a stepwise chronological approach covering these major historical periods: modern Romania before the First World War; Romania in the interwar period and during the Second World War; Communist Romania; and Post-communist Romania. Four major land reforms took place in Romania (in 1864, 1921, 1945 and 1991) within distinct political, economic and social historical contexts. One of the aims of these land reforms was to increase the individual rights of peasants, typically associated with the creation of individual households in agricultural economies. Moreover, this study provides a geographical examination of how the land reforms acted as a catalyst for the transition from capitalism to communism, and later, back to capitalism.

BOOSTING STUDENT ENGAGEMENT IN UNIVERSITY PHYSICAL ACTIVITIES: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

Physical activity is a critical component of a healthy lifestyle, significantly contributing to the prevention and management of chronic diseases, mental health support, and overall well-being. Despite its benefits, recent lifestyle changes in post-communist Romania have led to an alarming increase in overweight and obesity rates, especially among urban youth. This research focuses on the University of Bucharest (UniBuc) to explore the reasons behind students' low participation in university-organized physical activities. By employing a structured questionnaire distributed electronically, this study aims to collect comprehensive data on student demographics, participation levels, motivations, barriers, and suggestions for improvement. The quantitative analysis component of the study aims to identify participation trends and barriers, while qualitative insights will provide nuanced perspectives on students' experiences. The findings will inform targeted strategies to promote physical activity among students, contributing to their immediate and long-term health. Overall, this exploratory study seeks to lay the groundwork for future research on enhancing physical activity participation in academic settings, ultimately supporting the holistic development of young adults.

Predictors of mayoral reelection in Romanian local elections. Long-term analysis 1996–2016

This study aims to analyze the mayoral reelection rates in Romanian local elections between 1996 and 2016, a period marked by significant economic and political transitions. Given the post-communist context, understanding these dynamics is crucial for grasping Romania's evolving electoral behavior. In order to evaluate the dynamics of mayoral reelection rates in post-communist Romania, the primary research objective of the study consists in the assessment of the correlation between electoral participation and preferences for the incumbent mayors. In addition to this research objective, the paper aims to evaluate the impact of the ideological polarization in shaping electoral decision. An important research objective highlights the association between electorate's education level and political preferences for the incumbent political parties. Besides these objectives, the paper stresses the importance of the economic factors for predicting the dynamics of Romanian’ mayoral reelection rates. Using a quantitative research design based on nonlinear statistical regressions, the study highlights the importance of both ideological and economic vote in mayoral reelection. Moreover, statistical results indicate that both the interactions between left-right ideological polarization, secondary education and economic efficiency are significant predictors for explaining Romania's electoral behavior over time. The novelty of the study lies in the use of these interactions between ideology, education and economy for providing a deeper perspective on the mayoral reelection dynamics. These empirical findings are relevant not only for scholars but also for political decision-makers or electoral strategists, providing evidence related with electoral behavior in Romanian local elections.

Systematic review: locating qualitative academic publications for reviewing tenants’ and landlords’ renting experiences and interaction in the Majority World

This methodological protocol describes the step-by-step process of identifying the relevant international academic literature to be reviewed within the project ‘The affective economies of emerging private renting markets: understanding tenants and landlords in postcommunist Romania” (AFFECTIVE-PRS). It presents: (1) the preliminary decisions taken related to the breadth of the review (choice of databases, type of research, type of reference, searching fields); (2) the operationalisation of keywords and Boolean strings; (3) the further calibration of the searching parameters through piloting; (4) the final retrieval of relevant references through systematic and manual searches; and (5) the geographical coverage of the retained literature. While the paper demonstrates the rigour of the methodological approach taken, it also opens up the space for other scholars to scrutinise, replicate or adjust this approach to their own work.

Systematic review: locating qualitative academic publications for reviewing tenants' and landlords' renting experiences and interaction in the Majority World.

This methodological protocol describes the step-by-step process of identifying the relevant international academic literature to be reviewed within the project 'The affective economies of emerging private renting markets: understanding tenants and landlords in postcommunist Romania" (AFFECTIVE-PRS). It presents: (1) the preliminary decisions taken related to the breadth of the review (choice of databases, type of research, type of reference, searching fields); (2) the operationalisation of keywords and Boolean strings; (3) the further calibration of the searching parameters through piloting; (4) the final retrieval of relevant references through systematic and manual searches; and (5) the geographical coverage of the retained literature. While the paper demonstrates the rigour of the methodological approach taken, it also opens up the space for other scholars to scrutinise, replicate or adjust this approach to their own work.

“The revolution born out of a swear”: populist humour, carnivalization, and mass protest in Romania

ABSTRACT This article aims to make two contributions. First, at a theoretical level, I briefly outline an embedded narrative approach to populism, which is critical of treating it solely as an ideology or ontologizing it. This alternative approach provides a better understanding of the connection between populism, humour, and insults. Second, at an empirical level, I argue that the 2018 mass protests against the political elite in Romania were unique in that they turned a gendered and violent insult into a guiding political slogan, reiterated across both high and popular culture. Influential intellectuals, such as Gabriel Liiceanu, the most reputed public philosopher in Romania, proclaimed that this was a “swear (înjurătură) that unites us all” inspiring a new anti-communist “revolution”. By examining both the political imagination of the “institutional intellectuals” and popular artefacts (from T-shirts to popular songs), I interpret the Romanian protests and the role of “bad language” and populist humour as an expression of the carnivalization of politics and the intensification of antagonism in post-communist Romania.

How Can Digital Maps of Religions Inform Us about Fractionalization and Polarization in Post-Communist Romania?

This study explores religious diversity in Romania and how the trends of indices of religious fractionalization and polarization manifest at the county level in a post-communist period. The county level was selected as the relevant level for analysis due to its more clearly visible spatial dynamics with regard to religions. Recent studies have revealed that the erosion of diversity is an important aspect for any country and needs to be considered as an important aspect of democracy. This paper highlights how digital mapping of religious polarization and fractionalization in Romania has been generally maintained, although the regions of Transylvania, Banat, Dobrogea and Western Moldova remain areas in which there are different religions. Other than the general aspect of religious diversity depending on ethnic trends, there has been a rise of Pentecostals and Baptists at the county level. This aspect has further implications for our study, which calls for creating new institutions for dialogue between majority Orthodox communities and Protestants, not only so that potential conflicts do not appear between Orthodox and emerging religious communities but also to ensure objective, cultural, religious coherence. Our maps revealed the distribution patterns and the temporal evolution of religious denominations for the 1992–2011 period. The major line of originality in our research rests in the findings that after conducting a bivariate spatial autocorrelation analysis of religious fractionalization and polarization, we were able to identify two distinct clusters with spatial overlap over historical provinces.

Communism in Post-communist Romania: An Ambivalent Legacy

After Nicolae Ceaușescu’s execution on December 25, 1989, Romania faced an important issue to deal with: What was to be done with the 44 years of a quasi-totalitarian system, based on continuous political violence?! How should Romanians relate to it? What was to be remembered and what was to be forgotten? How it should be passed on to the next generations, those who were born before, around or after the fall of the regime? The answer to these questions has varied over the 35 years since the fall of the communist regime in Romania. Numerous factors contributed to the way in which Romanians related to their communist past, how it was represented in the public space, how it was and is passed on. The actors involved have also changed and the official public memory has known many avatars. In the subsequent pages, I propose an analysis of all these aspects, resulting from my research of the last 21 years on the memory of Communism.

Women in Accounting in Communist and Post-Communist Romania: Academia Case Study

Abstract We investigated whether there are differences in women’s progress in Romanian accounting academia between the communist and post-communist periods, and compared to the international context; and whether the legal framework in Romania influenced women’s accounting careers in academia. For the communist period, we found that for our topic training for the exercise of the profession, the evolution of women’s academics, although it did not exceed that of men, outperformed that of women in other contexts, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. Then, our findings were similar to the international context for teaching and leadership in academia. For the post-communist period, we observed Romanian academics’ similitude in teaching and bachelor studies and superiority in scientific publications and doctoral studies compared to their international counterparts. Also, the complexity of provisions assuring general or women’s rights, as well as the pace of their issuance aligned with women’s experiences in accounting academia.

Who Runs Public Administration? A Longitudinal Study of Technocratic Ministerial Appointments in Post-Communist Romania (1991–2021)

Starting from the traditional public administration dichotomy ‘power versus knowledge’, concerned with the cleavage between politicians and bureaucrats, this paper’s main purpose is to reframe a classic theoretical model, by placing the spotlight on a new, under-conceptualized public sector actor: the technocrat. Second, the paper performs empirical research starting from an own-build comprehensive database that includes all the ministers appointed in the Romanian Government during a 30-year timeframe (October 1991-November 2021). In spite of being a rather young democracy with a communist public sector legacy, research findings indicate that in Romania we can clearly identify patterns similar to other European countries (primarily Italy), consisting of appointing technocrats to the cabinet. Such nominations are discussed in correlation with the advancements of new theories of democracy and public administration, imprinted with Neoliberalism, New Public Management, and Good Governance paradigms.

Gender and democratic resilience against autocratisation: the case of Romania’s ‘gender identity’ bill

This article argues that, given the centrality of gender for recent processes of autocratisation, it has become imperative to understand and theorise the conditions underpinning democratic resilience against opposition to gender equality. I conceptualise democratic resilience as the outcome of critical actors’ efforts to represent marginalised groups in the face of threats to existing gender equality rights. The case study is Romania’s 2020 ‘gender identity’ bill, which would have prohibited discussion of ‘gender’ within the educational system but was eventually ruled unconstitutional. I identify two key causal mechanisms through which civil society organisations were able to shape this outcome: framing, which emphasised the bill’s non-compliance with democratic norms and constitutional principles; and learning, which prompted a reflection by the two key institutional actors, that is, the president and the Constitutional Court, as to the importance of core democratic principles for politics and society in post-communist Romania.

Advertising and the Birth of Post-Communist Romania (1989–1991)

A new historical period began in Romania after the events of December 1989 and foreign capital, with all its advertising arsenal, penetrated the Romanian economy despite the reluctance showed by the regime installed in Bucharest. Both the press itself and press advertising experience a radical metamorphosis, shifting overnight to a new ideological register. Gradually, advertising becomes professional, it becomes a business and, at the same time, an intermediary in the penetration of new products into the consciousness of Romanians. The persuasive force of advertising shapes new aspirations and participates in the creation of a new mentality. Starting from Thomas S. Kuhn’s research dedicated to the “paradigm shift,” we can ascertain that Romania has undergone very important changes in a relatively short time. This was not only on account of advertising, but advertising contributed to the change of Romania through the power of the “seduction of the subconscious.

Between Deprivation and Privilege: (Former) “Enemies of the People” in Communist and Postcommunist Romania

Communism everywhere it settled aimed to create a new society and the ‘new man’ in the shortest possible time. In order to put into practice such social engineering, it was necessary that those social categories refractory to change to be annihilated. There-fore, the former politicians, the landlords, the wealthy peasants (the kulak), the bour-geois, the intellectuals, the artists were methodically and constantly repressed. Laws, institutions and people were summoned to effect change through repressive methods. The beginning of the process of building the communist society created many ‘enemies of the people’, as the communists described them, victims of the class struggle, but also of their own ideals. Belief in the ‘Arrival of the Americans’, and in the short duration of Communism led them directly to prisons, hard labor and deportation camps. Many perished, but most escaped and returned to the society that was reconfiguring itself on new bases and with new values. The fall of communism brought their recognition as ‘victims’ of the totalitarian regim’s politics. In order to acknowledge their suffering the postcommunist Romanian state offers them compensations, granted them the label of ‘anti-communist fighter’, and eventually condemned Communism as ‘illegitimate and criminal’. My paper discusses all these issues while pointing out what was at stake in organized repression during communism as well as in recognizing the suffering of the repressed in the first postcommunist decades.

Ethnicities in Post-Communist Romania: Spatial Dynamics, Fractionalisation, and Polarisation at the NUTS-3 Level

Scholars have shown a special interest in discovering and studying the role of ethnic diversity and spatiality at the country and region levels. This study contributes to the theoretical debate on the spatial dynamics of ethnicities, with the aim of (1) determining the evolution of ethnic dynamics in post-communist Romania and (2) applying ethnic fractionalisation and polarisation indices. The study uses a mixed methods approach based on a descriptive statistics analysis and applies the fractionalisation and polarisation indices to Romania’s NUTS-3 (i.e., county) level. The findings suggest that the ethnic spatial dynamics in post-communist Romania have shown a decrease in all ethnicities due to migration and low birth rates, with the exception of the Roma ethnicity, for whom the trend is increasing. Additionally, polarisation and fractionalisation indices have different evolutionary manifestations depending on the dynamics of the ethnic groups present in certain geographical areas. Although neither of the two analysed indices has witnessed profound change at the spatial level, these small changes in spatial and short-term ethnic diversity can help us advance knowledge about co-existence in ethnically diverse societies. Higher values of the two indices are obvious in several counties where ethnic Hungarians cohabitate with Romanians and other ethnicities. This discovery can inform policy-makers to implement more policies for the further peaceful co-existence of Hungarians, Romanians, and other ethnic groups in Transylvania and other western counties in Romania. Furthermore, as the population growth trend for the Roma ethnicity is upward, Romania has to implement proper policies and build better government infrastructure to counter social inequality against the Roma people. This will help curb potential conflicts between the Roma and other ethnic groups at the local level. Finally, as most ethnicities decreased in number in post-communist times, further attention needs to be paid to the erosion of ethnic diversity in Romania because this could have a negative impact on economic development, social trust, and democracy.

An encounter with the public archives of Romania. In-between personal family history and collective history

Archives are related to history, memory, and the creation of meaning. In the context of post-communist Romania, getting access to and studying the archives of communism are highly relevant to help us understand the recent history of the region, including those events that a lot of people would like to be/have forgotten. As someone born in 1989, the year of the Revolution and the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, I am looking for my own answers in both state and private archives about the trauma the city of Bucharest suffered during communism, while also wanting to retrace personal family histories. This is an account of my first encounter with the archives of several public institutions and my preliminary observations on them.

Journeys to Significant Places in Orthodoxy as a Source of Sustainable Local Development in Romania

Religious tourism has developed in post-communist Romania, after decades of restrictions on the manifestation of the population’s religiosity. New monasteries and hermitages appeared and the number of travellers eager to arrive visit those and other religious places has increased. The purpose of this article is to support a sustainable orientation in the development of religious tourism in Romania. Content analysis of articles published by mass media in the last year regarding the two great Orthodox pilgrimages in Romania, to St. Parascheva in Iași and to St. Dimitrie the New in Bucharest, together with a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with group or solitary travellers and the results of two participatory observations conducted at monasteries in Făgăraș Land highlighted the types of journey to religiously significant places in contemporary Romania, i.e., pilgrimages, journeys to father confessor, spiritual journeys, group religious journeys and secular visits, as well as the particularities of hospitality related to them. Involving local communities in hosting and preparing meals for travellers to hermitages and monasteries would reduce pressure on monastic communities and contribute to sustainable local development. The inclusion of local historical sites in journey itineraries to religious places, and the revitalization of traditional local crafts would also contribute to this development.

Suffering into patrimony: dealing with communist repression in postcommunist Romania

Analyses of communist repression in post-communist Romania focused on anticommunism and its totemic figures. Laws, institutions and people promote this perspective, transforming the suffering of the formerly politically persecuted into a patrimony meant to be preserved and passed on. On the official level, the anticommunist paradigm gained momentum in December 2006 when the communist regime was condemned as ‘criminal and illegitimate’. However, a majority of the population have not embraced the official approach to communism as the fallen regime still acts as a ‘millieu de memoire’ (as defined by Pierre Nora). My article deals with the main institutions and laws which aimed at promoting and transmitting the memory of repression in post-communist Romania. Analyzing the memory politics as regards the communist repression might provide fresh insight into the ongoing process of building a cultural memory through selection, reconstruction and adjusting figures, deeds, and memorial items.

Nicolae Iorga as everybody’s political ally in post-communist Romania

This chapter discusses how the memory of an influential figure of modern Romania’s history like Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940), a foremost historian-politician and nationalist intellectual, became instrumental in the three decades following the end of communism by politicians. As he is considered the father of Romanian nationalism and a symbol of the nationalist struggle on the eve of WWI, Iorga’s memory in contemporary Romania allows us to examine nationalism in politics. In the research, a qualitative approach was adopted to the subject by dealing with discourses and initiatives produced by politicians as agents of memory in post-communist Romania. By looking at the various strategies of remembrance used after 1989 by these memory entrepreneurs, the research investigates the politicians who honoured Iorga, the purpose of their engagement in such politics of memory, and what this says about how post-communist politics, nationalism and memory mingled.

The role of the European Union and democratisation process in post-communist Romania

The fall of Communism in the Central and Eastern European countries in the year 1989, was a historical change had occurred after the demise of communism. The decline of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was one of the most important proceedings of the period: the conclusive end of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain. After the disintegration of the former USSR, the Eastern bloc had started the modernisation of institutions and adopted the norms of democracy. The third wave of democratisation of Samuel P. Huntington’s theory would apply the democratic changes in Central and Eastern Europe and Romania as well. It traces the discussions and opinions of institutional and political development in Romania with special attention to the events around 1989 Post-communism and Eastern enlargement of the European Union. The paper assesses the role of the European Union to promote democratization through Eastern neighbour policy. The paper broadly discusses the institutional and political development in Romania and the role of Copenhagen criteria and the country’s accession to the EU in early 2007. The result of this article is that Romania has successfully integrated into the European Union but that democratization is declining in the country.

The Ineffectiveness of Electoral Systems in Post-Communist Romania. A Substantive Approach

The Ineffectiveness of Electoral Systems in Post-Communist Romania. A Substantive Approach