Electoral Reform and Legislative Behaviour. A Network Analysis on the Romanian Parliament

In this paper, I analyze the characteristics of the legislative networks inside the Romanian Parliament. By treating the Members of the Parliaments (MPs) as nodes and their initiated proposals as links between the nodes, therefore measuring the relationships among them, I map out the networks of collaboration of the Romanian legislature for a period of four years and between two electoral systems -proportional representation with closed lists (2006-2007) and mixed-member proportional with single member districts (2009-2010). Based on the theory of competing principals with respect to legislative accountability, this account aims at spotting the differences in the structural positions of MPs before and after the electoral reform in 2008, emphasizing trends in legislative behavior. For this purpose, I apply social network analysis methods, compute centrality measures and sub-group analysis for each of the networks, and, in a comparative fashion, I set the basis for further analyses on how much of the difference can be attributed to the electoral system.