Non-voting in the 2018 Romanian referendum: the importance of initiators, campaigning and issue saliency

ABSTRACT

The requirement of a participation quorum for validity makes non-voting in referendums an important type of voting behaviour. This article seeks to explain non-voting in a referendum where the expectation was to have high turnout but where in reality only few voted, i.e. the 2018 referendum on the topic of same-sex marriage in Romania. Our explanations are inspired by the literature on turnout on elections to which we add several specific features of referendums. We propose three major sets of factors derived from the literature: access to resources, strategic decisions and campaign issues. The analysis relies on 36 semi-structured interviews with individuals aged 18 and above conducted in several urban and rural localities throughout Romania between December 2018 and March 2019.

KEYWORDS:

• Referendum
• non-voting
• initiators
• campaign
• issue saliency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The reasons are interconnected in real life. For example, there is interaction between components of a campaign: saliency can be influenced by the efforts and engagement of political parties in the campaign.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sergiu Gherghina

Sergiu Gherghina is a Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics, University of Glasgow. His research interests lie in party politics, legislative and voting behaviour, democratization, and the use of direct democracy.

Alexandru Racu

Alexandru Racu is an independent researcher. Ph.D. in Political Science with a doctoral thesis on de Maistre's and Dostoyevsky's critique of modernity. Research interests: political theology, political philosophy, the relationship between religion and modern ideologies.

Aurelian Giugăl

Aurelian Giugăl received his doctorate in political sciences. He is teaching assistant in Faculty of Journalism and Communication Studies, University of Bucharest. His research interests lie in political geography and voting behaviour.

Alexandru Gavriș

Alexandru Gavriș teaches at the Bucharest University of EconomicStudies, Department of Tourism and Geography. As a lecturer he teachesEconomic Geography, Tourism Geography and Geopolitics. His researchcovers methodologies in various contexts like vulnerability assesment, geographyof tourism, political geography and critical geography.

Nanuli Silagadze

Nanuli Silagadze is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, Åbo Akademi University. Her research interests lie in the fields of direct democracy, public opinion and voting behaviour.

Ron Johnston

Ron Johnston was a professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. He published widley in several areas of electoral studies.