Informal Partisan Politics: Country Presidents and their Former Political Parties in Romania

There are political systems in which the country presidents cannot be members of political parties. In many cases, the candidates are party leaders who give up their membership once elected in the presidential office. While many studies cover this process of moving from a party to a public office, little attention is paid to the relationships between country presidents and their former political parties. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature and analyses how country presidents use their informal powers to maintain an influence in the life of their former political parties. Our qualitative analysis focus on the two Romanian presidents between 2004 and 2020, each of them with two terms in office. It investigates how they played a role in the election of new party leaders, what they did to influence the position of their former parties in the political system (e.g. joining or leaving coalition governments), and how they contribute to their electoral performance. The analysis uses process tracing, which relies on a combination of primary (speeches, party documents) with secondary data (media news or party histories).