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.

Corruption Convictions and Legislative Party Switching

“…Party switching has been rampant: since 2000 each legislature has seen between seven and twenty-nine percent of parliamentarians leaving their original party.7 Table 2 reports the count of first departures (i.e. when someone leaves the party on whose ticket they were elected) as well as the percentage this represents of total parliamentarian mandates.8 Ideologically, the Romanian party system The change in electoral system and its implications has been amply discussed by Coman (2018Coman ( , 2013Coman ( , 2012. Klein (Klein, 2016) has studied the effects of the different electoral systems on legislative party switching.…”

Electoral Rules and Party Switching: How Legislators Prioritize Their Goals

“…In 2008, Romania changed its electoral system to one in which candidates run in single‐member districts. The electoral reform affected legislative behavior, encouraging candidates to cultivate a personal reputation separate from their party and pushing them to work harder in their districts (Coman ; Marian and King ). Based on suggested measures of incentives for personal reputation (Hallerberg and Marier ; Wallack et al ), Coman () demonstrates that the new electoral system creates stronger incentives for candidates to cultivate a personal reputation than the old system.…”

Does Electoral Reform Change MPs’ Behavior? Evidence from Romania

“…The reform meant that all MPs would be elected in SMDs: some after obtaining an absolute majority of votes and others depending on the proportion of votes won by their party in the county (Giugăl et al, 2017). 1 The electoral system reform was specifically promoted in the media as an encouragement to vote for people not parties, in order to increase individual accountability and the quality of MPs (Coman, 2013). Citizens would finally have the chance to punish corrupt or lazy MPs that were previously protected by the closed electoral lists.…”