Minority candidate success in Romanian local elections – an end to ethnic vote?

Local elections can be daunting for minorities that see their numbers drop while the majority population share increases. Romania was no exception, Hungarians having lost their chance of political representation for many urban centers where nationality based bloc voting would mean victory for the Romanian candidate. Yet, the 2020 local elections proved elections can be much more than headcounts – Hungarian mayoral candidates have gained significantly more votes than the ethnic composition would have predicted in several large urban centers. Târgu Mureş, a city with sharply divided local communities of Hungarians and Romanians that was the center of post-communist Romania’s worst ethnic riots in 1990, with 5 people killed and hundreds seriously injured, also saw a Hungarian mayor elected after 20 years rule of a Romanian mayor. Does this mean a withering role for culture and identity in politics? Have Hungarians and Romanians healed their wounds? Have Transylvanian cities move beyond political behavior predetermined by national identity? This paper investigates the possible reasons that might explain changes in the salience of ethno-national identity by examining the electoral motivations of the Hungarian and Romanian community in Târgu Mureş, captured in a post-electoral survey (N=1800, equally divided between the communities). While the pandemic and the protracted campaign (the elections have been postponed from spring to fall) certainly had an effect, we wish to test the salience of national identity vs. other preferences such as government evaluation, level of corruption, prospects of economic development or environmental preferences in explaining voting behavior. As such, we expect to test whether voter behavior is (instrumentally) rational or affective/expressive, more specifically, whether the traditional determinants of voting behavior provide convincing results. We test several hypotheses: do voters vote based on following a charismatic leader (Weber 1978, Kitschelt 2001); do they vote manifesting group identity (Horowitz 2000, Chandra 2004); choosing political programs (Fearon 1999, Posner 2005); base decisions on direct resource allocation (clientelistic patronage/favoritism) (Laitin–Van Der Veen 2012); or use cognitive shortcuts and cues (Ferree 2011) in making their choice? At the same time, measuring people’s attitudes on ethno-national identification and ethnic favoritism in both communities allows us to assess how successful was the Hungarian mayor’s bilingual campaign that gave up the previous explicitly nationality-centered rhetoric in reaching voters. Comparing the results across the two ethno-national communities will help us understand whether minority group members have fundamentally different political values and attitudes compared to majorities. This in turn tell us to what extent identity has been overcome and whether we see a withering away of identity politics in the multiethnic cities of Romania.