Increasing Representative Accountability through Electoral Laws: The Consequences of the 2008 Romanian Electoral Reform

Abstract

The paper tests the effects of the 2008 Romanian electoral reform on the behaviour of MPs with the help of personal interviews conducted post reform. The reform was meant to make MPs more responsive to the needs of constituents, which in turn should lead to more constituency input in the legislative process, while at the same time yielding proportional results. The paper finds that there are few channels for the transmission of constituents' needs to MPs, and the existing channels are used for petty requests that have little to do with the legislative procedure. This in turn encourages the development of clientelistic ties between representatives and voters, which benefit wealthier candidates. The study also finds that although the new system translates votes into seats closely, small parties may still be disadvantaged because of what Duverger (1954. Political parties: Their organization and activity in the modern state. New York: John Wiley) calls the psychological aspects of the wasted vote problem.

Keywords:

• electoral reform
• accountability
• Romania
• wasted vote
• clientelism

Note on Author

Emanuel Emil Coman received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, UK, email: [email protected]

Notes

1. Full accountability refers here to having all members individually accountable to their voters through being elected in single member districts.

2. Throughout the 1990s Romania was considered a laggard among former communist candidates for EU accession (see Ágh, 1999). The pro-European centre-right government that took power in 2004 made the fight against corruption a priority.

3. To understand better the concept of unused votes I detail the process through which the redistributions of seats at the second and third stages are done. At the second stage the total number of valid votes cast in a constituency is divided by the total number of seats/districts in that constituency to obtain the representation quota. This quota can be understood as the number of votes necessary to gain one seat. Then the number of votes obtained by each party in a constituency is divided by the representation quota to find the number of seats to which a party is entitled in that constituency. Let us take a hypothetical example of a constituency of five districts up for redistribution and three parties. The results of the divisions by the representation quota for the three parties may look something like 1.5, 2.8 and 0.7. The first party gains one seat at the second-stage redistribution, the second gets two seats and the third none. The unused percentages (0.5, 0.8 and 0.7), or more likely the number of votes associated with them, are pooled at the national level in the third stage of redistribution. The two unallocated seats are to be allocated in the third stage.

4. In the days leading to the referendum for the two-round majoritarian system President Băsescu created a free telephone line that the voters could use to inform themselves about the referendum. Callers could hear a message that began with the greeting: ‘I am Traian Băsescu president of Romania. I am inviting you to clean up.’ The message gave a detailed presentation of the effects of the law on the renewal of the political class, but said nothing about possible effects on the proportionality of the system (see România Liberă, 2007a).

5. The choice of limiting the analysis to the parties represented in parliament was dictated by the small number of people who declared themselves close to a given party, which makes the analysis difficult. This small sample problem is more acute for the small parties. As a consequence, I decided only to look at the sympathizers of the parties represented in the parliament.

6. Appreciation made based on their scores on the left–right dimension given in the 2006 Chapel Hill expert survey (see Hooghe et al., 2010).

7. Ideally, one would want to compare the 2008 post-election survey with 2004 post-election surveys. Unfortunately, I could not find any post-2004 election survey that includes both questions of interests. The only such survey is the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Unfortunately, the question about party closeness in this survey was open-ended and so responders could choose either an individual party or an alliance. This is problematic because two of the parties of interest (PDL and PNL) were in a pre-election coalition.

8. This became apparent in a discussion I had over dinner with two Liberal deputies. During our discussion I brought empirical evidence that pointed to the wasted vote problem and its effect on their party's vote share, but it was all dismissed (see Interview 2).

9. This opinion was not singular. For instance, another deputy saw the final version of the law as a concession made by PSD to their government partners, PNL (Interview 7).

10. Under pressure from the EU the national authorities intensified the fight against corruption and a considerable number of corruption cases came to the public eye. As proof, 19 of the candidates on the 2008 list were accused of corruption acts, whereas none of the candidates on the 2004 list was in such a position.

11. To test this assertion I visited deputy Ioan Oltean on a Friday during his audience time in the city of Bistrita. Oltean is the vice president of PDL, the leading party in the governing coalition, and vice president of the Chamber of Deputies. He also comes from a small county and is by far the most influential politician in that county. As a consequence, the waiting room at his office was packed with people from all over the county, mostly mayors affiliated with PDL and priests looking for money. The meetings were short and unorganized and often interrupted by people who would just walk in. At the same time in the same city deputy Ioan Tintean was also holding his audiences, yet the office was almost empty. He is a first-term deputy from an opposition party.