The surprise winner of the first round of Romania’s 2024 presidential elections was the populist candidate Călin Georgescu. Support for his candidacy has been interpreted through either the lens of the urban–rural divide (Cistelecan and Baghiu, 2025) or in relation to the articulation of nationalist-ecological themes that obscure structural inequalities (Trifan, 2025). Other interpretations describe this vote as a symptom of the “lumpenization” of the working class, arguing that a marginalised and weakly organised workforce becomes easily mobilised through conspiratorial and nationalist rhetoric (Rogozanu 2025). By contrast, some authors contend that anti-system votes do not originate in de-industrialised or economically lagging areas, but rather in regions characterised by industrial growth based on domestic capital, embedded within broader territories dominated by foreign capital (Petrovici and Poenaru 2025).
To contribute to this debate on the geography of the vote, we propose a composite index based on students’ performance in national examinations, aggregated at the school level and correlated with the vote share obtained by Călin Georgescu. We treat educational performance as a proxy for local socio-economic resources, as the literature consistently shows that educational outcomes are strongly stratified by household income, parental education, and community infrastructure. In this sense, the index captures the differentiated capacity of communities to accumulate and reproduce socio-economic capital, as well as varying levels of economic insecurity.
We proceed from the premise that economic insecurity has a significant impact on support for populist voting (Guiso et al. 2024). Preliminary results show a negative correlation between levels of school performance and higher electoral support for the populist candidate. However, the use of aggregated data in inferential analysis entails the risk of committing the ecological fallacy, as Robinson (1950) stated in his classic paper. Thus, this calls for caution in interpreting the identified relationships.
