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Center‐right parties in government in Romania and Bulgaria navigated the economic downturns associated with the Great Recession (2008‐12), and introduced austerity policies, yet had different electoral fates. While in Romania, the Democratic Liberal Party experienced a dramatic loss at the December 2012 elections, in Bulgaria, the Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria topped the May 2013 vote. In this article, we analyze these divergent outcomes, taking into account institutional configurations, strength of governing parties, and economic conditions. We argue that the electoral effects of harsh economic policies are conditioned by differences in the institutional aspect of governmental “clarity of responsibility” during the peaks of the recession. These differences in institutional clarity become then key factors in understanding the electoral fates of the center‐right parties in these governments. Related Articles Related Media Al JazeeraEnglish. . “Bulgaria Elections Gripped by Deadlock.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY8HvL5Bb5Q DW (English). . “Corruption Big Issue in Romanian Elections | Journal Reporters.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhmYhAP0zak

Utilizing a newly compiled data set, this article demonstrates that some election pledges made by the transnational Europarties are included among the European Commission priorities issued during the pre-legislative stage. The data set consists of 597 promises made by four transnational Europarties during the 2004 and 2009 European Parliament (EP) elections and of 698 subsequent Commission legislative intentions. Focusing on the time periods during the Barroso presidencies, the article’s findings suggest that (1) decision-making rules in the EP help us understand which transnational pledges are included in Commission priorities and (2) promises by two Europarties, such as the European People’s Party and the European Liberal and Democrat Party, are more likely to be considered by the Commission than those of other Europarties. Our results speak to scholarly debates on the place of the Europarties in the European Union inter-institutional relations and more broadly on the democratic legitimacy of the Union.

How does Eastern Europe contribute to the debate over eU's democratic deficit from an electoral perspective? Does Eastern Europe challenge our theoretical understanding of what motivates european citizens to participate and express their opinions in european Parliamentary elections? While there is no overarching consensus in the academic community regarding these questions, this essay aims to illustrate how a deeper understanding of one post-communist case and a bottom-up perspective on attitudes and political behavior in one locale, Romania, allowed the researcher to delve deeper into the taken-for-granted dynamics that european citizens from the South, east, and West engage in when voting in european Parliamentary elections. The approach of "ethnographic sensibility" mentioned in the workshop's discussions and illustrated in several contributions to this volume (see e.g. Kubik 2013; Knott 2015) constitutes then a useful starting point in deconstructing conventional knowledge. Moreover, during the process of moving up the ladder of generality and building inferences from one case study to a region, Eastern Europe still shares enough characteristics to deserve its own dummy variable, so to speak, in large-N continentwide analyses covering the 2004 and 2009 european Parliamentary (eP) elections. Yet, as Joshua Tucker (2015) mentions in his contribution, it is unclear whether the historical legacies discussed at the workshop and further elaborated on by grigore Pop-eleches (2015) will continue to play a role in a priori distinguishing eastern europeans' political attitudes and behaviors from other eU citizens in the South or West in future eP elections.

This article presents a new dataset of pledges made by Europarties during the 2004 and 2009 European Parliament elections, as well as pre-legislative priorities of the European Commission following these elections. The data cover two legislative cycles in the period 2004–2013. The article discusses the rationale behind the development of this dataset, the coding, and the measurement of the variables, and it highlights the applicability of these data.