Publications of Chiru, Mihail

Choosing you own boss: Variations of representation foci in mixed electoral systems

Members of parliament are privileged agents. They can choose who to regard as their principal: the entire nation, a particular electoral district or a political party. Focusing on two countries with mixed electoral systems, Romania and Hungary, the article documents the dominance of the electoral logic of role-formation over the constraints of legislative organisation and the influence of socialisation. The focus of representation is found to be only modestly influenced by the degree of the embeddedness of MPs in political structures and hierarchies. The association of the seat with a particular territorial unit, on the other hand, has a robust effect even when this association originates in the political environment and not in formal rules. Finally, the psychological effect of losing a Single Member District is also found to influence how MPs perceive their representative role.

Comparative Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Mapping Publications Over the Past 20 Years

This article offers a new empirical perspective on the state of Comparative Politics (CP) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). We present findings on the authors, methods, and epistemology of CP publications in the most relevant journals from eleven countries in the region. The major finding is that CP is rather marginal in CEE Political Science. Furthermore, CP articles predominantly focus on the authors’ country of origin, use off-the-shelf data, apply mostly qualitative data analysis techniques, and rarely take a historical perspective.

When voter loyalty fails: party performance and corruption in Bulgaria and Romania

This article identifies the determinants of party loyalty while making a distinction between government and opposition voters within an electoral cycle in the two most recent European Union members (Bulgaria and Romania). Both countries are characterized by the perception of widespread corruption and a general distrust of politicians that are likely to hinder the development of strong ties between citizens and parties. We test the explanatory potential of both traditional and revisionist theories of partisanship, suggesting that perceptions of corruption should be treated as equal to evaluations of actual performance. The statistical analysis of comparative study of electoral systems survey data emphasizes the salience of party performance evaluations for party loyalty. Corruption perceptions are significant predictors of loyalty in the Bulgarian case. Voters in both countries assess critically the performance of their preferred party whether it was part of the government or in opposition. A significant difference arises between government and opposition voters with regard to the predictive potential of identification conceptualized as closeness to a party.

Practice and payment: Determinants of candidate list position in European Parliament elections

This article fills a gap in the literature by explaining list composition and placement of candidates in closed PR (proportional representation) settings. Focusing on the case of Romania in the European elections of June 2009, we rely on an original data set including the sociodemographics, career history and wealth of all 215 candidates from the Romanian parties’ parliamentary lists. The results of our rank-ordered logistic regression indicate that at both the national and the party level the political competitors favour previous political experience and wealth of the candidates in establishing their final list order. Marginal effects of support from successful local branches, gender, age and education are also visible for various political parties.