The Benefits of Cooperation: Parliamentary Opposition in Romania

Post-communist politics in Romania displays strong features of cartelization in which a handful of political parties gained parliamentary seats, developed strong bonds and worked together to ensure control over politics and the economy (Gherghina 2014). Most of these parliamentary parties got involved in coalition governments across the ideological spectrum. Cooperation emerged between all the mainstream parties irrespective of how strong they opposed each other in previous terms in office. In 2008 the Democrat Liberals and Social Democrats governed together although they were in different camps the previous term in office; the same happened in 2012 with Liberals and Social Democrats. The only political actors without presence in the government were the radical right (no parliamentary seats since 2008) and the national populists (gained seats in 2012 but lost many MPs since then). The cartelization feature of Romanian politics points in the direction of cooperation between a large part of the opposition and seldom adversarial behaviour. This chapter will investigate the extent to which this expectation is supported by empirical evidence looking at two and a half parliamentary terms (2004-2008, 2008-2012, and 2012-2014). In line with the general idea of the book the analysis focuses on three dimensions – party, government, and parliamentary – and combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to understand the underlying mechanisms behind opposition behaviour. The study investigates the opposition behaviour of three mainstream (social democrats, democrat liberals, liberals) and two fringe parties (radical right and national populists) that competed in the three elections.