Votez, deci exist? Un studiu longitudinal al participării la vot în alegerile parlamentare din România[I vote, therefore I am? A longitudinal study of voter turnout in parliamentary elections in Romania]

The paper analyzes the dynamics of electoral participation and its predictors in Romania, using both official data on turnout and post-electoral survey data. The turnout in the Romanian parliamentary elections has declined by over 50% in the last 20 years of democratic reconstruction. However, turnout decline is unevenly distributed, being more dramatic in the last decade especially in the urban areas as well as among younger cohorts of voters. The decline of turnout in parliamentary elections is also accompanied by a shift in the importance of the predictors of voting. The analyses of electoral participation and its predictors suggest that voting in the Romanian parliamentary elections has become the attribute of a minority of citizens who still feel closer to a political party, are interested in politics, trust the political institutions and leaders, ideologically place themselves at the extremes of the left-right axis, and of those who are more exposed to mobilization attempts both because they live in smaller communities in the rural areas which are more easily controlled by local political leaders and because they are part of social networks that are influenced by political parties or politicians. This is the “hard core” of a generally apathetic electorate which is unconfident in the efficacy of elections as a tool for producing social transformations, a public which is becoming less and less demanding with the politicians after the subsequent disappointments with the democratic governance after 1989.