Evolutions of the Romanian electoral legislation after 1990. Do we need another electoral law?
Evolutions of the Romanian electoral legislation after 1990. Do we need another electoral law?

Summary/Abstract: Political representation is an extremely important issue for every democracy and it should closely reflect voters’ opinions. Therefore, the technical aspects that have an impact upon representation – the party system, the electoral system, the government – must be in complete accordance with the type of society in order for the outcomes to be positive. This paper aims to analyze the manner in which electoral reforms have been performed in Romania during the past 24 years, their strenghts and their week points, in an attempt to identify the grounds for a new electoral reform. In the last years, there were many voices who argued against the current electoral system and sustained the return to the previous one, of proportional representation. There are, however, another groups, who consider that neither the propportional representation, nore the single member majority system are the proper solution and, instead, the most suitable for Romania would be a mixed electoral system. The second part of this paper is based on the assusmption that the effects of the electoral law that functions in Romania after 2008 were not the expected ones and, worse, they contributed to the decrease in the population’s voting participation and in the diminished trust Romanians have in the political class. If we agree that, indeed, Romania needs a new electoral law, then we must answer to – what we consider to be – the main question: what would be the most appropriate type of electoral law for Romania? In order to do that, we try to search for a third solution, different from the ones we mentionned above and argue that Romania is prepared for and could apply one of the most „proportional” types of the proportional representation – the Single Transferable Vote.

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