Gherghina
Biographic Data
| ID | 42109 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gherghina |
| FAMILY NAME | Gherghina |
| SIGNATURE | GHERGHINA |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6627-5598 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 189 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1209 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 189 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Interested, able and prepared
The capacity of local actors to step up and exert a positive influence in their communities has been a key focus of international assistance in the contemporary context of overlapping crises. The centralization of powers has appeared to diminish local stakeholders’ influence in crises. This article tests this argument by examining the engagement of different local actors such as civil society, the private sector, and the media, in their communiti…
Great expectations
Very few political science graduates go into politics. While choosing a different career track may be a matter of personal preference or context, the extent to which political science prepares students for political careers is questionable. This article seeks to explore that question by analysing how political science prepares students for activities within political parties. It draws upon semi-structured interviews conducted with political scien…
How Politicians Understand Deliberation
Previous studies have explained politicians’ positioning on deliberation, while paying little attention to what they understand by deliberative practices. This article addresses this gap in the literature and maps the ways in which politicians understand these practices, both in general and more specifically in relation to their political parties. Our analysis focuses on Romania as an exemplary case of limited experience with, and low exposure to…
Political parties and democratic innovations
Despite the popular appeal of democratic innovations and of political parties’ need to reconnect with citizens, many parties are reluctant to embrace innovations - especially in the form of direct and deliberative democracy - either internally or in the wider political system. This is counter-intuitive behaviour on which the literature rarely reflects. This special issue addresses this gap and makes two main contributions to the existing research…
Consensus About the European Union? Understanding the Views of Citizens and Political Parties
This thematic issue provides evidence that reflects some recent developments in the study of consensus toward the EU. It analyses to what extent citizens and political parties share a consensus about the EU and how this consensus is manifested, constituted, and mobilized. The thematic issue makes two contributions to the literature: it maps the contours of consensus and disagreement across EU member states and candidate countries and explains the…
Government Support, Populist Attitudes and State Surveillance in Hungary
State surveillance has been extensively investigated in various contexts in relation to the use of technology, external threats and people’s attitudes and characteristics. However, the relationship between political attitudes and the public’s acceptance of state surveillance has been underexplored. Our article addresses this gap in the literature and aims to identify the effects of citizens’ political preferences regarding the acceptance of state…
Standing apart
Thriving on poor soil? People’s attitudes towards deliberation in transition countries
Demand for and participation in deliberative practices have often been studied in democratic settings where they were available or took place. However, there is limited information about what shapes people’s attitudes towards deliberative practices in countries that struggle with representative democracy and where deliberation is not available. This article addresses these gaps in the literature and aims to explain why people in the Republic of M…
Who wants to be in the Driver’s seat? Members’ views on intra-party democratic innovations
Intra-party democratic innovations are on the rise around the world and burgeoning strands of research provide an institutional understanding of how political parties approach them. However, we still know little about how party members view democratic innovations and the benefits they can bring to the party. This article addresses this gap in the literature by mapping party members’ views on intra-party democratic innovations, and by identifying …
Religious Community, Language and Family
Existing scholarship has studied the Church’s role in facilitating emigration through providing various forms of assistance. However, there is limited research about the characteristics of the migrants benefiting from such aid, particularly in terms of the combination between social embeddedness and religious devotion. This study addresses this gap by investigating how the Neo-Protestant churches in Romania help in the emigration process, and exp…
In the Pursuit of Democracy
Support for referendums has often been investigated in new and established democracies. However, we know very little about what drives support for referendums in transition countries. This article addresses that gap and aims to identify the determinants of support for referendums in the Republic of Moldova. The analysis uses individual-level data from a survey in November 2024 based on a nationally representative sample in the aftermath of a divi…
Transformational Party Leaders
The literature discussing leadership style identifies great variation between contemporary party leaders. While much attention is devoted to their actions, portrayal in the media, and relationships with their followers, there is limited analysis of which factors make a party leader transformational or transactional. This article addresses this gap in the literature and seeks to identify the characteristics of the party leaders or of the party to …
New Tools for Old Habits
Whistleblowing in private and public sector organizations has gained momentum in the last decade. Most theories seeking to explain why some employees report wrongdoings largely disregard the interaction between the cognitive and emotional components of this decision. Our article addresses this gap in the literature and proposes a theoretical model that was initially developed in cognitive psychology and accounts for such an interaction. We explor…
Ever distant union
This article provides a new perspective on EU exit as an exemplary form of disruptive dissensus or extreme Euroscepticism by examining how it is shaped by people’s attitudes towards the Union’s actions during the COVID-19 pandemic. We test how the dissatisfaction about how the EU handled the pandemic limited the trust in how it would manage it in the future, and influences a preference to exit the EU. We use a multi-level statistical model which …
Politics outside parliament
The role of politicians in referendums has been extensively analyzed from the perspectives of referendum initiation and use, and policy implementation. We know relatively little about what politicians think about referendums, and therefore from understanding how far they are from what citizens believe and being able to predict their propensity to adopt or block referendums when they are in office. The present article addresses this gap in the lit…
Party digitalization and members’ empowerment
The digitalization of political parties has often been approached from the perspective of political parties. Previous studies discuss the potential impact of technology on empowerment, but the users’ attitudes to this are largely unknown. To address this gap in the literature, our article analyses how party members view the empowerment potential of digital tools in their party. We use data from semi-structured interviews conducted in November and…
Political parties and participation
People's knowledge about their representatives is important because it informs about the quality of democracy and can predict future political behaviours. In spite of this, we know little about why migrants (do not) know who their representatives are. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature and explains the migrants’ subjective knowledge about parliamentarians. The study uses individual data from an original survey conducted in J…
Population Dynamic and Brokers’ Credibility
Politics, Identity and Civic Engagement
Migrant protest activity has been often analyzed from the perspectives of the protest nature and issues it addressed. A comparison of protest behaviour before and after migration is largely missing. It remains unclear whether people who were actively protesting in their home country continue to be engaged in protests after migration and why. This article addresses this gap in the literature and aims to explain what made the Ukrainian migrants pro…
Strengthening Religious Ties
Previous studies show how religious affiliation and activity often facilitate the integration of migrants and their descendants, strengthens their sense of belonging, and increases their acceptance in the host society. However, the characteristics of immigrants who benefit from the church’s help in the integration process remain largely unknown. This article addresses this gap in the literature and analyzes the ways in which the Neo-Protestant Ch…
Parties abroad and migrants' representation in the country of origin
Some of the reasons for which political parties develop organizations abroad are to represent the emigrants, to mobilize them electorally and to provide support. So far, we know very little about how migrants think about and interpret these actions. To address this gap in the literature, our article aims to explain what drives migrants' perceptions that party organizations abroad represent their interests in their country of origin. We use indivi…
Too little, too vague
Populist parties place the people at the centre of polity and politics. Such parties refer to direct democracy as a suitable avenue to involve people in the decision-making process but much less is known about their approaches towards deliberation. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature and analyses how populist parties talk about deliberation in their election manifestos. It tests empirically how much they speak about deliberat…
Why Political Parties Support Deliberative Democracy in Europe
The contemporary surge in public demand and use of deliberative democracy coincides with an increasing number of parties using deliberation. Despite this growing appetite, we still do not know why political parties support deliberative democracy. This research note addresses this gap in the literature and aims to explain what drives parties’ support for deliberation. We analyze the manifestos belonging to 225 European parties that gained at least…
From Pitch Perfect to Epic Fail
No abstract available
Mass Shooters and Religious Bias in the US Printed Media
What drives the religious media bias in their coverage of mass shooters in the US? Understanding the source of media bias can structure future research on the portrayal of mass shooters and can be a major step in promoting bias-free reporting. This article aims to identify the potential determinants of religious media bias by focusing on the shooter (religion and religious motivation) and victim (race) characteristics. It covers 34 mass shootings…
Linking Democratic Preferences and Political Participation
An extensive body of literature discusses the disaffection of citizens with representative democracy and highlights increasing citizens’ preferences for political decision-makers beyond elected politicians. But so far, little research has been conducted to analyse the relations between citizens’ respective preferences and their political behaviour. To address this void in the literature, our article investigates the extent to which citizens’ pref…
Practice and payment
This article fills a gap in the literature by explaining list composition and placement of candidates in closed PR (proportional representation) settings. Focusing on the case of Romania in the European elections of June 2009, we rely on an original data set including the sociodemographics, career history and wealth of all 215 candidates from the Romanian parties’ parliamentary lists. The results of our rank-ordered logistic regression indicate t…
A new model of clientelism
The study of clientelism has pointed in the direction of a pyramid structure in which selective benefits are distributed with the help of brokers to individuals or groups in exchange for political support. This approach treats the resources aimed to enhance electoral mobilization as endogenous and fails to explain what happens when brokers have very low capacity. To address these problems this article proposes a bi-dimensional model of clientelis…
Direct democracy and subjective regime legitimacy in Europe
While much research focuses on the causes and consequences of direct democracy and regime legitimacy, little attention has been paid to the potential relationship between them. In an attempt to fill this void, this paper focuses on the legal provisions for direct democracy and its use. The key argument is that possibilities for the public’s direct involvement reflect high importance given to citizens, openness of the regime towards different mode…
Communism’s shadow. Historical legacies and contemporary political attitudes
No abstract available
An Alternative to Representation
Extensive scholarly attention is devoted to citizens’ preferences for alternative models of political decision-making. However, few efforts were made to identify who these citizens are and why they display a certain preference. To address this void in the literature, our article analyzes the determinants of preferences for citizens as decision-makers. It uses individual-level data from a 2014 survey on a probability representative sample in Germa…
Support for direct and deliberative models of democracy in the UK
The models of direct and deliberative democracy are broadly considered the major alternatives to representative democracy. So far, the two models have been merged under the broad umbrella of participatory democracy and thus little is known about why citizens support direct democracy and/or deliberation. They are distinct procedures, driven by different logics and outcomes and this makes it likely that the preference for them rest on different pre…
Do populist parties support referendums? A comparative analysis of election manifestos in Europe
Rethinking intra-party cohesion
Intra-party cohesion (IPC) is a concept extensively used to assess institutional change and behaviour in legislative and party politics. In spite of its popularity, there is confusion about its meaning mostly derived from its multidimensional nature. This article aims to clarify the understanding of this term across three different fields of research (legislative studies, party factionalism and Hirschman’s theory applied to intra-party dynamics) …
Policy agendas and births and deaths of political parties
The standard model of political party density emphasizing the interaction of social cleavages and district magnitude (M) is incomplete in accounting for number of parties in cases of high values of M in an arbitrary way. We explore an alternative model for such cases emphasizing the slack in the issue agenda available to parties with which to construct viable identities or niches they can employ to mobilize cognitively-limited voters. The model i…
Unpacking LogM
The standard model of political party system density combines two traditions to explain why some countries have more political parties than others, one tradition that emphasizes social cleavages and another that emphasizes electoral institutions, especially district magnitude. Despite its considerable success, there are several reasons to be less than fully satisfied with the standard model. We examine two of these problems associated with the sc…
Conceptualizing and Measuring Support for Democracy
Much of what we know about public support for democracy is based on survey questions about “democracy,” a term that varies in meaning across countries and likely prompts uncritically supportive responses. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring support for democracy. We develop a battery of 17 survey questions that cover all eight components of liberal democracy as defined by the V-Dem project. We then ask respondents from 19 national sam…
Deliberative democracy and political parties
Research on intra-party deliberation focuses extensively on its normative aspects and its potential benefits for democratic quality. Little is known about how deliberation functions in practice and the consequences it has. This symposium aims to fill this gap in the literature by bringing together four examples of political parties that use deliberative practices: the Czech Pirate Party, the Danish Alternativet, the Romanian Demos, and the Spanis…
More than voters
There is much research about how migrants engage with politics in their home countries and about how state institutions facilitate this involvement. Yet, we know little about how members of Parliament refer to, and debate, issues related to communities of emigrants. The ways in which legislators give voice to and represent the de-territorialized demos has broad implications for the functioning of contemporary democracies. This article analyzes th…
Challenges and realities of political participation and civic engagement in central and eastern Europe
No abstract available
Determinants of legislative voting loyalty under different electoral systems
Previous research has found mixed evidence regarding the change of parliamentary voting behaviour following electoral reforms. But scholars have not analysed whether the mechanisms by which voting loyalty is elicited matter differently in such cases. Our article fills this gap by investigating the individual variation in voting loyalty across two legislative terms, using a sample of 26 high-stakes roll-call votes. Romania constitutes an ideal set…
The Failure of Cohabitation
Built on concurrent claims of legitimacy, the semi-presidential constitutional framework is prone to conflicts between the office holders. Cohabitation is a particular instance in which the president’s party is not represented in government and he has to share executive power with a prime minister. Instead of producing a flexible dual-authority structure within the executive, cohabitation has always tended to generate institutional crises in Roma…
Parliamentarians' Support for Direct and Deliberative Democracy in Europe
The increasing critique of representative democracy and its institutions determined reformers to consider the direct and deliberative processes as potential solutions to bridge the gap between elites and citizens. Substantial research investigates the functioning of these alternative models of democracy, but surprisingly little attention is paid to politicians' perspectives and preferences for these reforms. This article fills this gap through an…
Populist Attitudes and Direct Democracy
Earlier research links citizens’ populist attitudes with the support for referendums. However, the foundations and meaning of this relationship remain unclear. This research note proposes a theoretical, conceptual and methodological discussion that identifies three main problems: studies linking populist attitudes with support for referendums have a rather narrow theoretical framing limited to populist studies, there is much ambiguity surrounding…
When who and how matter
Rewarding the ‘traitors’? Legislative defection and re-election in Romania
Legislative defection in political systems characterized by party dominance and cartelization is usually seen as damaging the members of parliament's (MPs') careers. Switching legislators does not portray an image of confidence and reliability and the MPs’ re-election is unlikely. Drawing on a dataset that includes all defector MPs in post-communist Romania until 2008, this article indicates that one in five defectors gets re-elected. The quest f…
Why political parties use deliberation
How Political Parties Use Referendums
This article is part of the special cluster titled Political Parties and Direct Democracy in Eastern Europe, guest-edited by Sergiu Gherghina. Extensive research has shown how political parties use referendums to achieve their goals. Most studies use either a policy-oriented or an institution-based approach to explain parties’ actions. In spite of much empirical evidence, to date the analytical dimensions have not been put together to facilitate …
A test of European Union post-accession influence
The positive role of the European Union (EU) in the democratization process in post-communist countries has been amply documented. The pre-accession conditionality was to a large extent the tool used to enhance adoption of norms, and implementation of policy. In this context, it is less clear what happens after countries join the EU and conditionality is no longer an option. This article seeks to provide an answer by analysing how the EU can infl…
Too little, too vague
Populist parties place the people at the centre of polity and politics. Such parties refer to direct democracy as a suitable avenue to involve people in the decision-making process but much less is known about their approaches towards deliberation. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature and analyses how populist parties talk about deliberation in their election manifestos. It tests empirically how much they speak about deliberat…
Unraveling romance
Improving Rookies’ Performance
General figures indicate stark differences between both cross-country and cross-party groups in MEPs’ activity. Our attempt to explain this variation accounts for five variables (plus age for control): (1) the background of the MEPs, (2) their political experience, (3) belonging to a European party group, (4) the duration of their mandate, and (5) their status (i.e. elected versus appointed). Using statistical techniques and original data, we foc…
Practice and payment
This article fills a gap in the literature by explaining list composition and placement of candidates in closed PR (proportional representation) settings. Focusing on the case of Romania in the European elections of June 2009, we rely on an original data set including the sociodemographics, career history and wealth of all 215 candidates from the Romanian parties’ parliamentary lists. The results of our rank-ordered logistic regression indicate t…
Unpacking LogM
The standard model of political party system density combines two traditions to explain why some countries have more political parties than others, one tradition that emphasizes social cleavages and another that emphasizes electoral institutions, especially district magnitude. Despite its considerable success, there are several reasons to be less than fully satisfied with the standard model. We examine two of these problems associated with the sc…
Explaining Ethnic Mobilisation in Post-Communist Countries
The complex dynamics of inter-ethnic relations in post-communist countries leads to a puzzle: why do some ethnic minorities mobilise to obtain political representation whereas others do not? We use qualitative comparative analysis to capture complex causal patterns explaining the formation of ethnic parties and to analyse the combined effect of social, economic and political variables. Our article bridges a significant gap in the existing literat…
Keeping the Doors Closed
This article is the first systematic exploration of the leadership selection process in the Romanian party system. We use process-tracing and qualitative tools, using data from party statutes and documents of the national conventions. We focus on the parliamentary political parties throughout the entire post-communist period. The analysis shows that nothing has changed at the level of centralization of decision, and inclusiveness with the members…
Foreign Interventions in Ethnic Conflicts by Robert Nalbandov
MPs' Role Orientations in Newly Emerged Democratic Legislatures
Understanding the behaviour of the elected representatives at the beginning of the transition period in former Communist countries provides an insight into some of the first freely elected parliaments after decades of authoritarianism. The role perception grasps the essence of how MPs position themselves in their decision-making process in a fuzzy institutional setting. By relying on the sole established institutions for that period (that is, pol…
Does government performance matter? Electoral support for incumbents in six post-communist countries
For two decades, the Central and Eastern European party politics has been characterized by the widespread inability of parties to secure stable political support (reflected in high levels of electoral volatility) to allow their presence in government for consecutive terms. This paper investigates the factors that trigger support for incumbent parties in post-communist countries. In doing so, it examines the effect of individual evaluations at the…
The first casting happens at home
This article illustrates the importance of recruitment procedures for early representational role formation. Using data from elite interviews and socio-demographic characteristics of 34 Romanian candidates in the 2009 European parliamentary elections, our analysis fulfils two goals. Apart from substantiating the relationship between the degree of selection centralization and party-oriented roles, this study tests and validates new causal dimensio…
Why Look Back
Nostalgia for the communist past originates in positive evaluations of communist political and economic systems and in identification with the Soviet Union. It is people's socialization in a particular political culture and identity, rather than their negative feelings toward the current regime and its performance, that explains this phenomenon. The same factors operate in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, irrespective of country-specific development…
Determinants of Positive Attitudes towards an Authoritarian Regime
The political and economic transition of Belarus has particular features among the post-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus is characterized as an authoritarian regime personified in its president. This study identifies sources of citizens’ perceptions of the political regime in Belarus. We argue that the way in which citizens perceive the political regime is primarily determined by eco…
Voting after Watching
The November 2009 Romanian presidential elections illustrate the process through which media exposure to exit polls during the election day allows strategic voting in the least expected situations (i.e. in the first round of a two-ballot setting). Organized in a two-round system in which the first two competitors qualify for the second round, these elections display one unsolved dilemma. The difference registered in elections between the two chal…
Taking the Short Route
This article illustrates how the growing complexity of regulations regarding party funding in post-communist Romania is paralleled by practices employed by political parties in their attempt to gain increased access to state resources. Our document analysis indicate that political parties managed to exploit the weaknesses of the increasingly complex legislative framework. A cyclical process takes places: parties use the existing flaws in the legi…
Where does religion meet democracy? A comparative analysis of attitudes in Europe
Starting from the growing importance of religion for politics, this article tests whether religion in Europe is connected with democratic attitudes. Analyzing and understanding such a relationship is essential for a better understanding of the prospects of present and future democratic consolidation. Our two-step approach aims to assess the variation and causal forces of democratic attitudes in Europe in the light of broader country-level factors…
Where Does the Mechanism Collapse? Understanding the 2008 Romanian Electoral System
Following six rounds of national parliamentary elections disputed under a closed-list PR system, in 2008 Romania adopted an electoral reform. The new system is triple-layered and combines proportional representation with voting in single-member districts. Its first use reveals discrepancies between the logic of proportional representation, for which it was chosen, and the produced results. By focusing on the system's functioning mechanisms, this …
When voter loyalty fails
This article identifies the determinants of party loyalty while making a distinction between government and opposition voters within an electoral cycle in the two most recent European Union members (Bulgaria and Romania). Both countries are characterized by the perception of widespread corruption and a general distrust of politicians that are likely to hinder the development of strong ties between citizens and parties. We test the explanatory pot…
We all agree that we disagree too much
What determines the preferences of members of parliament (MPs) for increased discipline in new democracies characterised by low levels of party unity? Using an original survey that includes half of the Romanian deputies, this study assesses through bivariate and multivariate analyses the impact of role perceptions, party career and experience, nomination-related views, and institutional preferences (electoral system) on the likelihood that an MP …
Data Availability in Political Science Journals
A characteristic of recent decades of scholarly work in the social sciences has been the increased amounts of empirical research. Access and availability of data are prerequisites for further research, replication work, and scientific development. As international peer-reviewed journals have gradually become the central forum for research debate, moves towards data sharing are dependent upon the policies of journals regarding data availability. T…
Standing for Reelection Under Different Rules
Perceptions of a political career and the importance given to the parliamentary office drive the desire to seek reelection, but the strength of these factors varies by type of electoral system
Going for a Safe Vote
This paper tests a dual rationality of electoral bribery with evidence from Romania. Earlier research argues that the era of mass liberal democracies brought such practices to an end. However, empirical evidence indicates that this is not the case. Using a qualitative approach, this single-case study shows how the territorial division of votes in a relatively stable environment of party competition can foster the existence of electoral bribes. It…
The Failure of Cohabitation
Built on concurrent claims of legitimacy, the semi-presidential constitutional framework is prone to conflicts between the office holders. Cohabitation is a particular instance in which the president’s party is not represented in government and he has to share executive power with a prime minister. Instead of producing a flexible dual-authority structure within the executive, cohabitation has always tended to generate institutional crises in Roma…
Defeating authoritarian leaders in postcommunist countries
Defeating authoritarian leaders in postcommunist countries." East European Politics, 30(1), pp. 148–149
One-Shot Party Primaries
While party primaries for candidate selection gain gradual popularity in established European democracies, they remain rare in Eastern Europe. This article focuses on the Romanian Social Democrats and investigates the reasons why primaries were abandoned after one use. The central argument is that this short lifespan was determined by the absence of relevant short-term benefits. A few pathologies of the primaries led to their failure: contest adm…
Policy agendas and births and deaths of political parties
The standard model of political party density emphasizing the interaction of social cleavages and district magnitude (M) is incomplete in accounting for number of parties in cases of high values of M in an arbitrary way. We explore an alternative model for such cases emphasizing the slack in the issue agenda available to parties with which to construct viable identities or niches they can employ to mobilize cognitively-limited voters. The model i…
Political science (170 works) · Politics (161 works) · Law (155 works) · Law (140 works) · Sociology (117 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (111 works) · Political economy (96 works) · Economics (80 works) · Public Administration (67 works) · Public Administration (60 works)