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The first dimension of party competition encompasses the struggle of political parties
to capture the support of electorate and to collect as many votes as possible in order to
obtain governmental offices or to maximize the parliamentary representation of the
party. Conversely, the second dimension involves the electorate acting only as an
indirect actor. If the electoral period is characterized by the adaptation of parties'
public discourse to the preferences of electorate, during the parliamentary competition
political parties try to anticipate the preferences of the electorate and to promote those
actions that are expected to win votes in the next elections.
However, this swift description of nature of party competition might let
someone with the misleading impression that political parties adapt all the time their
public discourses to match with the preferences of the electorate. The ideological
constrains and long-term interests usually represent barriers to the adaptability of the
public discourse of the political parties. In order to maintain the credibility of their
public discourses, political parties have to keep a certain degree of consistency among
the present policy preferences and former policy positions they proposed in the past
elections. Although political parties are not anchored in fixed positions on the
dimensions of party competition and they tend to move within specific policy space,
they can not pass beyond this policy space without the risk of loosing their political
credibility (see James Adams, 2001). Moreover, ideology represents an identity mark
of each political party, and although the level of ideological intensity differs from case
to case, usually political parties try to emphasis what makes them different from the
other political parties in order to individualize them from other competitors.
From these points of view, this research proposal questions about the nature of
party competition in Romania and the policy positions of Romanian political parties.
The purposes of this paper are twofold. The first one is to give an exploratory outlook
about the policy positions emphasized by the Romanian political parties in the
political competition. The second aim is to evaluate whether the competition among
Romanian political parties tends to take programmatic form, and, for this goal, several
specific hypotheses guide the research about the party competition in Romania.
There are several underlying hypotheses about party competition in Romania.
From institutional point of view, Romania is a semi-presidential system, with a
proportional electoral system. While a proportional electoral system clearly favors a
programmatic competition (due to the fact that members of the same political parties
do not compete directly one against the other in elections, and thus are encouraged to
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