Attributing Community Division to Media Coverage: A Comparison of Roșia Montană Residents and People Resettled in the Recea Neighbourhood of Alba Iulia, Romania

The Roșia Montană community experienced both a prolonged conflict over a mining project and sustained national and transnational representations of that conflict, while some families left the commune permanently through resettlement. This article examines how widespread the attribution of community division to media coverage is, how it varies across social groups, and whether it differs between those who remained in the commune and those relocated to the Recea neighbourhood of Alba Iulia. The data come from two questionnaire surveys using the same core instrument: one in the commune of Roșia Montană, in February and May 2020 (N = 282), on a non-probability purposive sample proportional to each village’s adult population, and one in Recea (N = 45). The dependent variable is a single five-point Likert item. The analysis uses non-parametric tests with Holm adjustment and ordinal logistic regression, including models fitted to the pooled sample with group and interaction terms. In the commune, agreement represents the majority position (57.9%; valid N = 278) and is weakly but significantly associated with age, without the relationship being strictly monotonic. In Recea, 46.7% of respondents agree. The two groups differ sharply in their evaluation of leaving the area and in counterfactual scenarios about the project, but not in attributing division to media coverage (r = 0.078), and interactions between group and predictors do not improve the model. The attribution thus appears as a widely shared and weakly structured explanation, similar across the most visible line separating these two segments of the community.