The Different Sides Of Objective And Subjective Well-Being: Implications On The Changes At Institutional Level

The scenery of social movement in Romania, started at the beginning of this year following the Emergency Ordinance issued by the Romanian Government, which provided, among others, collective pardons and amendments of the Penal Code, was largely described by the media in two key points: On one hand, a political one, which placed under discussion the alleged manipulation of the parties in opposition, parties which accumulated frustrations related to the weak results obtained at the last parliamentary elections; the rejuvenation of the anti-PSD sentiment; the attempt to break the main party in the Government; blocking the economic investment program of the government installed after the elections; the reconstruction of the popularity of Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, which declared himself against the Government program, but also against the main political party in Government, etc. On the other hand, one in which the moral component was in the focus of the public debate, by underlying several messages with ethical roots; the diversification of the forms of masked corruption; “unfair behavior in the public space”1 of the government party; the fear that the history is reversible; the fact that the attempt of the Government to implement a law in the area of corruption had hidden and well-calculated objectives. At the intersection between the two explanatory frontiers, once with the disarming of the conflict, it remained a media construction unidentified scientifically: the image of the two countries of Romania which are irreconcilable (the poor Romania versus the rich Romania), willing in the future to confront argumentatively their own decisional alternatives as regards their own social path. Complementary to the two approaches, the article seeks to introduce in the explanatory equation a new variable, almost absent in the series of the debates in the Romanian press: social pressure to change the institutional behavior in Romania. Has the Romanian society changed in the last 27 years in a way that we can feel a pressure towards changing the formal institutions, as a first step of changing the political practices? What has changed and how can we explain this pressure towards change? Do we have data that support this hypothesis? We know from Robert Putnam that the “performance of an institution depends on its social, economic and cultural background.” How does this background in Romania looks like at the beginning of 2017? How do the Romanians perceive the quality of their own lives at present?