The 2008 electoral reform in Romania replaced the closed PR electoral system, which had been used since 1990, and contested throughout the entire period by the civil society, with a mixed system based on voting in single member districts. Public discourse framed this change as a panacea for all the flaws of the political system (e.g.: the lack of direct accountability and the deficient responsiveness to constituency problems, the parties’ ability to protect and ensure the re-election of corrupt politicians etc.).
The present paper assesses whether the 2008 electoral reform induced a change in legislative behavior in accordance with the goals of the reformers. In other words, did the legislators become more concerned with constituency interests? And if such a shift occurred, did it take place at the expense of substantive policy representation? In order to answer these questions we compare the MPs’ patterns of collaborations in proposing/sponsoring bills in the last Parliament elected under PR (2004) and the first legislature elected in the new electoral setting (2008). We draw on an original dataset containing 3,515 proposals initiated in 2006-2007 and 2009-2010 (Neam?u 2011).
This study proposes a complex and innovative research design combining social network analysis (measuring structural network dynamics: the density of the policy network compared with that of the constituency/ pork barrel networks) with multivariate statistical tests (negative zero-inflated binomial models). The former helps to build an analytical framework for detecting patterns of legislative collaboration (Fowler 2006; Cho and Fowler 2010). The latter predict the MPs’ dyadic collaboration by taking into account their policy expertise (committee membership) and constituency orientation, while also controlling for party affiliation, government-opposition status and their parliamentary experience. Our findings indicate a counterintuitive decrease in the overall density and cross-partisan nature of the networks after the electoral system change, but at the same time, they illustrate more collaboration between MPs representing SMDs from the same county, which supports the constituency service enhancement thesis.
