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Political Game-Changers: The Importance of Leaders for Newly Emerged Parties in Romania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2021

Sergiu Gherghina Open the ORCID record for Sergiu Gherghina [Opens in a new window]  and
Marius Grad Open the ORCID record for Marius Grad [Opens in a new window]
Sergiu Gherghina
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow, sergiu.gherghina@glasgow.ac.uk
Marius Grad
Affiliation:
Babes-Bolyai University, marius.grad@ubbcluj.ro
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Abstract

Party leaders continue to be crucial players in politics. The theories of personalization and presidentialization of party politics reflect the centrality of leaders’ roles. Little attention has been paid to the effects of leaders on the formation and development of newly emerged parties. This article aims to fill that gap by analyzing the effect of leaders on the formation, intra-party cohesion, and membership organization of three newly emerged Romanian parties between 2015 and 2019. The qualitative analysis uses content from primary (party documents and elite discourses) and secondary sources (media reports). The findings indicate that the leaders’ approaches towards party formation and organization differ substantially across the examined parties and explain their cohesion and electoral appeal.

Keywords

political partiesleadersparty formationcohesionmembership
Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 3 , Fall 2021 , pp. 608 - 628
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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61. Earlier research indicates that membership rolls communicated by party headquarters tend to be exaggerated. In the case of ALDE, PMP and USR, these are the only available sources. There are some numbers in the media, but these also come from the headquarters. While the veracity of these numbers cannot be checked, it is very good for our longitudinal analysis that they come from the same sources. In case there is a bias, this is systematic and is likely to occur at all moments in time, which does not affect the quality of our analysis (i.e. we are interested in trends over time). This would have been much more problematic for a cross-party comparison.

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