Varieties of gerrymandering and malapportionment can appear not only in electoral systems where all legislative seats are allocated to plurality winners in single-member districts but also in proportional Single-Member District (SMD)–based electoral systems and in settings where multi-partisan committees draw the district boundaries. This article investigates such a case, in which the main parliamentary parties collaborated in order to minimize the uncertainty regarding intra-party allocation of seats. The 2008 electoral reform in Romania created such opportunities, and both the SMD maps and the electoral results at the parliamentary election held in the same year indicate that the parties collaborated to design a number of safe seats for each of them. We draw on a novel data set that measures the degree to which the newly created SMDs reflect natural or artificial strongholds of concentrated partisan support in otherwise unfavorable political territories, and also assess the malapportionment of these districts. All three types of mechanisms were frequently used, and our logistic regression analyses indicate that nomination from the “right” type of SMD was the main factor deciding which of each party’s candidates got elected. The statistical analyses are complemented by a qualitative investigation of the political composition and design of 9 SMDs.

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Held on 6–7 October 2018, the Romanian referendum on the topic of gay marriage was the fourth referendum of this kind organised in East Central Europe over a five-year period. Because turnout was low in all of them and demands explanation, this paper: i) discusses the common characteristics of these Eastern European marriage referendums, contextualising the Romanian referendum; ii) overviews the history of the Romanian referendum, emphasising the legal, political, ideological and societal aspects; iii) quantitatively examines the electoral geography of the voting patterns; and iv) interprets qualitative data seeking to understand the voters’ choices and why conservative mobilisation was so weak.

An increasing number of electoral systems is being introduced which seeks to combine single-member districts with a proportional allocation of seats according to parties' national vote shares. One such system, that differed in its key features from many others, was introduced in Romania in 2008 and used in that year's general elections, when it performed reasonably well. It did not at the next elections in 2012, when an unforeseen consequence of a coalition winning more than half of the votes cast was that a number of 'overhang' seats was allocated to each house in the bi-cameral parliament, representing some 20 per cent of the total number of elected members. The system was then abandoned and replaced by the previously-used proportional representation system. This paper describes the system and its operation at the two elections, discussing the reasons for its introduction and later abandonment.Most electoral systems fall into one of a small number of 'families', identified by a few criteria: the number of members returned from each constituency; the method of voting; and the method deployed for translating a party's vote total into its number of legislative representatives (Farrell 2011;Gallagher and Mitchell 2018). In many countries one of the foundational criteria of their electoral systems is that legislators are returned from separate areas within the national territory; their major representative role is for their residents there -alongside their functions as national legislators (either in government or in opposition) -and they are expected to promote their constituents' individual and collective interests. Such systems, as has been well-established, generally produce disproportional outcomes for political parties contesting elections, hence the decision in many countries (as in much of western Europe: Carstairs, 1980) to adopt proportional representation systems in multi-member constituencies where the links between legislators and specific territories might be much weaker. Additionally, where there are more than two candidates in single-member districts it is frequently the case that none receives support from a majority of those voting at an election, leading to the introduction of the Alternative Vote system in a few countries (such as Australia: Farrell and McAllister, 2008), which retains the link between each legislator and a separate, defined territory but ensures that the elected candidate has majority support.Until relatively recently most countries opted for either the plurality system in single-member constituencies or preferential voting in multi-member districts aimed at achieving (near-)proportional representation, but a number have sought an alternative system that combines desirable elements from those two. Multi-member proportional (MMP) systems, for example, combine representation from single-member constituencies for a substantial proportion of the elected members, thereby ensuring close links between a territorially-defined electorate and its representative, with the remainder electe...

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