Communist and Post-Communist Studies Using the Pandemic as a Pretext: Voter Absenteeism in the 2020 Elections in Romania [56/2]

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SERGIU GHERGHINA

Politics and International Relations, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland European Studies, Babes,-Bolyai University Cluj, Cluj-Napoca, Romania PA U L T A P

International Studies and Contemporary History, Babes,-Bolyai University Cluj, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Using the Pandemic as a Pretext Voter Absenteeism in the 2020 Elections in Romania ABSTRACT One of the most visible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is on voter turnout. Earlier research

concludes that the pandemic depresses turnout by looking at statistical patterns and testing the explanatory power of pandemic casualties against alternative causes. Based on the existing results, we only assume that the pandemic was related to depressing turnout but we do not know if that happened. In this sense, there is limited attention paid to people’s perspectives. This article addresses this gap in the literature and analyzes the importance of the pandemic for absenteeism through the eyes of (non)voters. It focuses on Romania, a country with a particularly low turnout in the 2020 national elections compared to the previous elections. The analysis uses 21 semi-structured interviews conducted with persons with a different sociodemographic profile who voted in 2016 but did not vote in 2020. We use inductive thematic analysis to identify the reasons behind their absenteeism. The main findings reveal that the main reasons for absenteeism are rooted in voters’ long-term attitudes toward the political system and elections. The COVID-19 pandemic did not appear to influence people’s absenteeism, but was sometimes used mainly as a pretext to stay at home. KEYWORDS voter turnout, pandemic, apathy, politicians, Romania

INTRODUCTION

Voter turnout in national legislative elections in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is on average more than 20% lower than in Western Europe (Petricˇevic´ & Stockemer, 2020). Existing research provides extensive explanations about why few East Europeans vote. These explanations range from institutional arrangements such as the lack of compulsory voting or the poor organization of elections to a broad range of political attitudes such as dissatisfaction with democracy, limited party identification, perceptions about the functioning of the economy, or low trust in political actors (Harper, 2000; Bernhagen & Marsh, 2007; Fagan & Kopecky´, 2017). The national elections organized during the COVID-19 pandemic in many CEE countries show even lower turnout than before. For example, in the 2020 national elections in Croatia, Lithuania, and Serbia, there were between 3% and 7% fewer voters at the polls; in two of these countries the turnout was an all-time low record. It is unclear whether the pandemic had an effect on absenteeism. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, pp. 1–19, ISSN: 0967-067X, e-ISSN: 1873-6920 © 2023 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https:// www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/cpcs.2023.1823167

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S E R G I U M I S, CO I U

COVID-19 AND ABSENTEEISM

The COVID-19 pandemic is the most impactful global crisis since World War II, with consequences on the economic, political, and social sectors that had to be addressed directly by state authorities (Flanders, Flanders & Goodman, 2020; Johnson, Pollock & Rauhaus, 2020). People had to accept deprivation of basic rights such as the freedom of movement or the prohibition to organize or take part in physical gatherings (Landman & Splendore, 2020). The pandemic required new organizational procedures for political processes (e.g., voting) and shaped the way in which citizens perceive these processes (Flanders, Flanders & Goodman, 2020). Some studies show that due to the anxiety, fear, 2

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This empirical puzzle becomes relevant in the context in which some studies find an association between voter turnout and the risk of infection in primary elections (Flanders, Flanders & Goodman, 2020). Another study on US primaries illustrates that the likelihood of voter turnout decreases when the rate of COVID-19 increases in the country (Scheller, 2021). A comparative study at the national level finds that in those polities with higher numbers of deaths caused by COVID-19, the electoral participation is lower than before the pandemic (Santana, Rama & Casal Be´rtoa, 2020). While all these studies indicate statistical patterns and test the explanatory power of pandemic casualties against alternative causes, they do not gauge voters’ perspective. In other words, based on the existing results, we only assume that the pandemic was related to depressing turnout but we do not know if that happened. This article addresses this gap in the literature and analyzes the importance of the COVID-19 pandemic for absenteeism through the eyes of voters. It focuses on Romania, a country with a particularly low turnout in the 2020 national elections (almost 32%, which is roughly 6 percentage points less than in the previous legislative elections); this comes after three elections with relatively stable turnout between 2008 and 2016. Our analysis uses 21 semi-structured interviews conducted with persons with different sociodemographic profiles who voted in 2016 but did not vote in 2020. The interviews were conducted in December 2020–January 2021, which is within two months from the elections, to avoid memory bias. We asked the respondents about the reasons they did not vote without being obvious that we were interested in the importance of the pandemic. However, if the voters did not mention it in the answers to the main questions, we used follow-up questions that asked about the pandemic. We use inductive thematic analysis to identify and discuss the reasons behind their absenteeism. The following section reviews the literature about the reasons that influence absenteeism, with emphasis on the potential effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. The third section outlines the research design used for this analysis with emphasis on the case selection, method of data collection, and method of data analysis. Next, we briefly discuss the evolution of voter turnout in Romania since 1990 to contextualize the 2020 elections and then the party system and main competitors running in 2020. The fifth section includes the discussion of results. The conclusions discuss the main findings and the implications of this study for the broader field of electoral participation.

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and stress generated by the probability of getting infected with the virus, individuals were reluctant to engage in political processes held in person (Va´zquez Carrero et al., 2020; Haute et al., 2021; Noury et al., 2021; Renstro¨m & Ba¨ck, 2021). The pandemic generated several situations that deepened individuals’ absenteeism: general fear of the virus, new conditions for in-person voting, and the vulnerability of specific social groups. The rest of this section addresses each of these in detail. The general fear of the virus prevented people from voting based on a rational calculus that weighed the importance of fulfilling their civic duty / using their right to vote and the risk of being exposed to the virus (Cipullo & Moglie, 2021; Fernandez-Navia, PoloMuro & Tercero-Lucas, 2021; Parzuchowski et al., 2021; Picchio & Santolini, 2021). People were afraid of both getting infected and spreading the virus. On the one hand, the presence of in-person voting during the pandemic was significantly lower than before COVID-19. When voting was organized during periods in which the authorities reported higher cases of infected people and deaths caused by the virus, individuals were skeptical about putting their health at risk (Santana, Rama & Be´rtoa, 2020). This reasoning was also applied in cities with high population density that did not necessarily have higher infection rates (Fernandez-Navia, Polo-Muro & Tercero-Lucas, 2021; Picchio & Santolini, 2021). On the other hand, people were afraid of spreading the virus, felt altruistic toward others, and thus stayed at home on Election Day (Haute et al., 2021; Noury et al., 2021; Picchio & Santolini, 2021; Morris & Miller, 2022). Evidence from the Basque Country shows that the voter turnout is almost 5% lower in municipalities that reported cases of infection and more than 6.5% lower in those municipalities that declared deaths caused by the virus (Va´zquez Carrero et al., 2020). Similarly, during the 2020 presidential elections held in Malawi, the general fear of the virus led to a turnout that was 10% lower than the general elections held the previous year (Dulani et al., 2021; Chirwa et al., 2022). In-person voting favored the spread of the virus in the 2020 Czech elections as well: the infection rates grew faster in higher-turnout constituencies compared to those with lower turnout (Palguta, Levı´nsky´ & Sˇkoda, 2022). The pandemic could lower the turnout because it brought new strategies for organizing in-person voting: fewer polling stations, new mandatory and strict procedures, and the need to know all of this information before voting (Constantino, Cooperman & Moreira, 2021; Merkley et al., 2022; Morris & Miller, 2022). These features increased the costs (e.g., energy, money, time) for voters. First, due to the higher risk of infection— especially in highly populated areas—the authorities reduced the number of polling stations and did not organize them in close proximity to each other (Noury et al., 2021). Voters had to spend more money and time for getting to the polling stations (Leromain & Vannoorenberghe, 2022). At the 2020 elections in the US state of Wisconsin, due to the fact that the pandemic increased the costs for voting by limiting the number of voting stations, voters’ enthusiasm and willingness to vote decreased (Curiel & Clark, 2021). Second, the pandemic led to stricter procedures for in-person voting such as social distancing, limited interactions among voters, and mandatory sanitation rules (Noury et al., 2021; Leromain & Vannoorenberghe, 2022). Voters had to buy protection equipment (e.g., masks) without being reimbursed (Noury et al., 2021;

The Usual Suspects for Absenteeism

All these pandemic-related reasons for absenteeism are a newer addition to a bigger picture that includes several factors that drive voter turnout in general: alienation and apathy, economic welfare, partisanship, and the vagueness of electoral promises. To start with the first, low voter turnout is associated with feelings of alienation and apathy toward politics (Stoker, 2006; Southwell, 2008). Alienation refers to individuals’ tendency to isolate themselves from the political process, while apathy is the lack of enthusiasm to engage in political activities (Aberbach, 1969; Curato & Niemeyer, 2013). Political alienation and apathy are driven by external factors such as dissatisfaction toward how democracy works, economic problems, lack of trust in political institutions, lack of partisan feelings, and the vagueness of electoral promises (Benton, 2005; Norris, 4

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Merkley et al., 2022). In addition, in-person voting became time-consuming since the lines and waiting time for voting became longer (Merkley et al., 2022). Third, voters spent more energy getting informed about the new mandatory procedures for voting. Without this effort, they could not vote (Noury et al., 2021; Morris & Miller, 2022). The vulnerability of specific social groups could also influence absenteeism. Vulnerability can be divided into objective, which refers to those who are more vulnerable than others to contract the virus (e.g., elders, those with chronic medical conditions), and subjective, which covers those who perceive themselves as being more vulnerable although this is not necessarily the case (Flanders, Flanders & Goodman, 2020; Picchio & Santolini, 2021; Scheller, 2021; Merkley et al., 2022). To start with the objective category, elders were less likely to vote in-person during the pandemic since they are vulnerable in the face of any health risk (Johnson, Pollock & Rauhaus, 2020; Noury et al., 2021; Picchio & Santolini, 2021). Official statistics show that those who are over 60 years are more likely to contract the virus (Haute et al., 2021; Leromain & Vannoorenberghe, 2022) and those over age 65 are inclined to develop severe forms of COVID-19, while those over age 85 have considerably higher death rates (Johnson, Pollock & Rauhaus, 2020). Evidence from Italy, France, and the United States illustrates that in those places with higher rates of COVID-19 infection or deaths among elders, the voting presence of elders was much lower than before the pandemic (Picchio & Santolini, 2021; Scheller, 2021; Leromain & Vannoorenberghe, 2022). The same applies to those with underlying health conditions including chronic diseases, obesity, and weak immune systems (Noury et al., 2021; Picchio & Santolini, 2021). The perception of belonging to vulnerable groups was a strong predictor for voter absenteeism. For example, this may be the case of women who perceive themselves as being more vulnerable than men in getting infected by the virus (Yıldırım, Geçer & Akgu¨l, 2021). Women perceive themselves as more vulnerable to security threats in comparison to men (Nellis, 2009; Valentova & Alieva, 2014), and the perception was similar for the COVID-19 pandemic (Dulani et al., 2021; Yıldırım, Geçer & Akgu¨l, 2021). Although the virus appears to be deadlier for men (Picchio & Santolini, 2021), evidence from the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil shows that the voting turnout of women was lower when the infection rates were large (Constantino, Cooperman & Moreira, 2021).

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2011; Fagan & Kopecky´, 2017). While representative democracies allow individuals to engage in political actions and decision-making (O’Donnell, 1998), there is increasing dissatisfaction toward the functioning of representative democracies over the last decades (Norris, 2011). This attitude is often generated by poor government performance characterized by inefficient policies, low-quality public services, policy disapprovals, or wealth changes (Van Ryzin, 2007; Cheruiyot, Katumba & Wray, 2019). As such, democratic dissatisfaction can influence voter turnout because individuals tend to alienate themselves from voting when they do not believe that engaging with this practice will fulfill their political and social expectations (Stoker, 2006; Karp & Milazzo, 2015; Fagan & Kopecky´, 2017). Another factor that explains absenteeism at the polls is the economic welfare of the state and the financial stability of individuals. Since citizens consider the political actors responsible for the state of the economy within the country, their engagement in politics is influenced by how political actors deal with economic matters (Solt, 2008). When societies and individuals face economic hardships and financial instability, citizens develop negative feelings toward political institutions (Rosenstone, 1982; Kostadinova, 2003; Burden & Wichowsky, 2014). Under these circumstances, people lose enthusiasm or promote a form of protest against inefficient political institutions, which results in non-voting (Kostadinova, 2003; Bernhagen & Marsh, 2007). Low political trust is an important trigger for voter turnout since this is the cornerstone of a good relation between individuals and representative institutions (Braithwaite & Levi, 1998). It is generated by fair, honest, and respectful behaviors as well as by efficient policies and the ability of political institutions to meet their commitments (Cox, 2003; Phelan, 2006). When this is the case, people are more likely to follow the institutional guidelines and to engage in political actions (Cox, 2003; Gro¨nlund & Seta¨la¨, 2007). However, when individuals perceive political institutions as being corrupt and believe that they are manipulated by politicians, their interest in supporting these actors and voting decreases (Bowler & Karp, 2004; Schumacher, 2013). In the long term, low political trust erodes the legitimacy of political outcomes and makes individuals believe that there is no point in voting since the corrupt institutions will not strive for the good of the general population (Pacek, Pop-Eleches & Tucker, 2009; Chong et al., 2015; Karp & Milazzo, 2015). Partisanship is described as a form of emotional attachment toward a belief, ideology, or party, or all of them. It creates a collective identify shared between partisans that enhance their pride and helps them differentiate from other groups that share other identities (Shamir & Arian, 1999; Huddy & Bankert, 2017). Some individuals who do not identify with political parties do not vote—especially in contexts with persistent economic, political, or social problems—because they do not differentiate between political actors and perceive all of them as being inefficient and unworthy of their support (Crepaz, 1990; Gherghina, 2014; Fagan & Kopecky´, 2017). The vagueness of electoral promises is another potential trigger for absenteeism. Electoral promises are important parts of electoral campaigns because through them political actors strive for obtaining voters’ support (Banducci & Karp, 2003). They can

RESEARCH DESIGN

We test the extent to which these factors can explain the absenteeism in the Romanian legislative elections organized in December 2020. Romania is the appropriate setting to conduct this analysis because it is the most likely case where we should expect an effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on voter turnout. There are two main reasons for this. First, between 2008 and 2016 the percentage of voters in the national elections was relatively stable and a decrease in the percentage of votes in 2020 was likely to be caused by a contextual determinant like the pandemic. An alternative explanation for the lower turnout in the 2020 elections is external migration. The 2022 census shows that Romania had roughly one million fewer citizens living in its territory compared to the previous census in 2011. Second, the lockdown measures in Romania were quite severe and the national elections were organized on the eve of a second announced lockdown.1 The threat of COVID-19 infection was credible to many citizens and electoral participation could have been negatively affected by it. We conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with citizens who did not vote in the 2020 national elections but who voted in the previous national elections (December 2016). We stopped with the interviews once we reached the saturation point. We used snowball sampling to recruit the participants and we aimed for diversity in terms of geographic distribution (different counties),2 gender, age, and profession (Table 1). The interviews took place in December 2020 and January 2021 mostly online, with seven respondents being interviewed in person. Each interview lasted between 30 and 40 minutes. All respondents were offered the option of having the interviews online but some of them insisted on having them in person. We provided that option to avoid a negative self-selection bias, that is, those who were not afraid of being infected by COVID-19. The answers were recorded with participants’ consent and then transcribed. We used the determinants outlined in the previous section to formulate the questions in the guide for the semi-structured interviews, which is available in the Appendix. This study uses inductive thematic analysis based on the answers we received from interviews. Thematic analysis is appropriate for this study because it allows the identification of common themes/reasons for which people did no vote. Inductive analysis does 1. As in many other societies, there was COVID-19 denial at the time of elections in Romania. However, we cannot estimate how widespread this phenomenon was and that is why we argue that for many citizens the threat of infection was credible. 2. Romania is divided into 41 counties of different size in terms of population (maximum size of county is around 800,000 people) plus the capital city, Bucharest. The table includes the official acronyms of the counties; “B” is for Bucharest.

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range from ideological promises that reflect the political actors’ beliefs to valence issues such as economic matters, protection of the environment, or improved social services (Jacobson, 2015). However, people will not vote when they perceive the electoral promises as being vague, unachievable, or not addressing the real social/economic issues (Bernhagen & Marsh, 2007; Karp & Milazzo, 2015; Enyedi & Deegan-Krause, 2017).

TABLE 1.

Interviewees’ Profiles

Initials

County

Gender

Age, y

Profession

1

I.N.

CJ

M

54

Physician

2

O.M.

AB

F

44

Saleswoman

3

D.T.

BN

F

31

Secretary

4

A.U.

SJ

M

67

Retired

5

M.N.

MM

M

24

Student

6

J.K.

HG

M

45

Bartender

7

F.N.

CV

F

33

Lawyer

8

R.P.

AG

M

62

Unemployed

9

S.C.

OT

F

57

Housewife

10

A.M.

B

N/A

23

Student

11

L.M.

B

M

52

Technician

12

M.F.

PH

F

44

Farmer

13

A.D.

CT

F

29

Police officer

14

I.Z.

AR

M

72

Retired

15

S.O.

MH

M

56

Teacher

16

M.C.

DJ

F

49

Accountant

17

I.G.

IS

M

33

Worker

18

G.P.

BC

M

51

Driver

19

E.T.

SV

F

42

Nurse

20

F.J.

BV

M

20

Student

21

I.L.

VS

F

59

Saleswoman

not presuppose the existence of preestablished coding frames (Clarke & Braun, 2017; Nowell et al., 2017). Instead, we code (and group) the data into themes based on patterns identified in the respondents’ answers. The process of data collection, theme assignment, and analysis was organized in three stages. First, we—the authors of this article— clustered the text of the interviews into themes. Second, we compared the individual lists of themes that revealed a high level of convergence between them. Third, we came up with the final themes that are presented in our analysis.

VOTER TURNOUT IN ROMANIA AND THE 2020 ELECTIONS

In Romania, the national legislative elections use a closed-list proportional representation system (between 1990 and 2004 and since 2016) with a 5% threshold for political Gherghina et al. | Using the Pandemic as a Pretext

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No.

FIGURE 1.

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Voter turnout in post-communist Romania, 1990–2020. Source: IDEA (2021).

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parties and an 8–10% threshold for electoral alliances, and a mixed-member proportional system in 2008 and 2012 (Gherghina & Jiglau, 2012). The elections are organized simultaneously for both chambers of the Romanian Parliament—the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate—that have similar functions and are elected in the same manner; the main visible difference between the two is the number of senators, which is roughly onethird of the deputies. The percentage of seats gained by political parties in both chambers is similar. Figure 1 depicts the percentage of voters in the national legislative elections in Romania since 1990. The first post-communist elections recorded a very high turnout of almost 80%, which was matched two years later by a turnout slightly higher than 76%. The first legislative term was shorter because it was a constituent assembly in charge of adopting the constitution and issuing the main laws that would allow a smooth transition of the country. This high turnout stayed at the same level in 1996 when the democratic forces won the elections for the first time. Between 1996 and 2008 there was a declining trend in turnout reaching roughly 40%. It then stabilized around this percentage for three elections to decline in 2020 to almost 32%. The Romanian party system in 2020 included five parliamentary political parties— two major and three minor—and two parties that were on the edge of gaining parliamentary representation but eventually failed. The first major political party is the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the winner of all but one legislative elections in postcommunist Romania. Its average share of votes between 2000 and 2012 was around 35% with very little volatility in this time period (Gherghina, 2014), whereas in 2016 it gained 46% of the votes. In 2020, it got close to its usual performance with around 30% of the votes (Code for Romania, 2021). It is a successor of the Communist Party (PopEleches, 2008) and maintained large organization and membership rolls. Over time, it

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was included in many government coalitions; in the last decade, the PSD governed more than five years in most of these as the formateur. The National Liberal Party (PNL) is the second-largest party in the country, with an average of 20% of the votes in the last four elections since 2008. In the 2020 elections, it was the main government party at the time of the elections, and gained approximately 25% of the popular vote (Code for Romania, 2021). The party merged in 2014 with the Democratic Liberal Party (PDL), which was ranked third at the time, and thus strengthened its position as the main challenger of the PSD. In spite of this rivalry, the two parties formed an electoral alliance in 2011 that comfortably won the 2012 legislative elections, but then disintegrated at the beginning of 2014. In 2021, the PNL and PSD again joined forces in government after the third-ranked party left the coalition led by the PNL. The Save Romania Union (USR) was formed in 2015 elections and was ranked third in both elections in which it competed (2016 and 2020). In the 2020 elections it gained roughly 16% of the votes (Code for Romania, 2021) by running in an alliance with the Freedom, Unity and Solidarity Party (PLUS), with which it merged in 2021. The party has a protest rhetoric, with some features of populism (Dragoman, 2021), that appeals to the values of the young urban population. The Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) was formed in 2019 and has a radical right ideology characterized by nationalism (including xenophobia and antiEU rhetoric), emphasis on religion, and traditional values. The party enjoyed the support of the Romanian Orthodox Church (Gherghina & Mis¸coiu, 2022) and gained roughly 9% of the votes. It marks the first presence of a radical-right party in the Romanian Parliament since 2004. The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR) is an ethnic party formed in December 1989 that gains 6–7% of the votes on a regular basis and plays a pivotal role in many governing coalitions. In addition to these parliamentary parties, the 2020 competition involved two other competitors that were credited in the opinion polls with real chances to gain seats. The first was the People’s Movement Party (PMP), belonging to the former country president Traian Ba˘sescu and formed in 2013 as a splinter from PDL. The party gained seats in 2016 but failed to pass the threshold in 2020. The second was Pro Romania (PRO), belonging to a former PSD prime minister who resigned in 2015 after street protests in the aftermath of a fire in a nightclub in the capital city (Cret¸ an & O’Brien, 2020). This party was a splinter from PSD, emerging in 2018 as an intra-parliamentary party. The 2020 election campaign was characterized by three main lines of rhetoric, which are established themes in post-communist Romanian politics and society. The first theme is corruption, a topic with broad appeal to politicians, journalists, and the public. The politicians use corruption allegations to denigrate opponents, to outline the poor performance of state institutions, or to mobilize the electorate. In addition to reporting on the more prominent cases, the journalists cover the activity of the Romanian National Anticorruption Directorate and the annual progress monitored by the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism in relation to the rule of law and the fight against corruption. The Romanian public understands corruption as part of the national heritage, rooted in the country’s cultural history (Zerilli, 2013), but this does not prevent them from

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mobilizing in anti-government protests when they feel the rule of law is endangered, which happened with the 2017–18 protests. Against this background, corruption was again in the spotlight for the 2020 election especially with the emergence of an antiestablishment party (AUR) and the ongoing anti-corruption rhetoric of USR. The PNL accused the PSD—which was in government for the first three years in the 2016–20 term in office—of repeated attempts to undermine the rule of law and to facilitate the access of corrupt people to public office. In May 2019, the PSD leader Liviu Dragnea was sentenced to three and a half years in prison in a corruption case. This sentence came the second day after the referendum organized by the country president (the former PNL leader) on anti-corruption topics. A second theme refers to the role of state institutions in the political decision-making process. Romania is a semi-presidential regime with a relatively weak country president in which the parliament has the upper hand in relation to the executive (Raunio & Sedelius, 2020). In practice, since 2004 the country president has played an active role and has taken actions that could be interpreted as crossing the border of his prerogatives. One visible consequence of this role was the strong connection between the president and his former party—according to the constitution, the country president cannot be a party member. The country president pushed his party to form the government, while the party supported the president’s actions. In this context, the importance of legislature was often questioned by the executive branch but also by political parties. In 2009, the country president initiated a referendum in which the citizens agreed with one chamber (instead of two) and with downsizing the number of legislators from more than 450 to 300 on average in every term (Gherghina, 2019). Though this initiative was not implemented, the country presidents continued to engage in anti-parliament (and anti-cabinet) rhetoric during periods of co-habitation. In the 2020 election, AUR’s anti-elite discourse targeted the inefficiency and corruption within the parliamentary ranks. This contestation of the institution and its officeholders is done for electoral support as well: Eurobarometer surveys illustrate that Romanians have very low confidence in the legislature on a regular basis. A third theme is the European Union’s (EU) and the political parties’ adoption of views that ranged from radical Euroscepticism (AUR) or moderate critiques oriented against the EU (PSD) to moderate (PNL) or strong support to the EU (UDMR and USR). The Eurosceptic discourse—both the moderate and the radical—is not along the lines of taking the country out of the EU but focuses on preserving the national identity, receiving more support from the EU, and gaining a more prominent role in the decision-making process. The political elites agree to the importance of the country’s EU membership, which is intuitive since the population remains one of the most positive toward the EU among the member states according to Eurobarometer surveys. Unlike the previous election and the subsequent years in which it had a more radical anti-EU discourse (Marian, 2018), PSD nuanced its position under a new party leader and provides a specific type of criticism related to country’s importance in the decisional process.

ANALYSIS AND RESULTS

Low Trust, Vague Promises, and Limited Stake

Almost all the interviewees expressed their lack of trust in parliament as the primary reason of their non-participation in the elections. Their statements confirm the general trends observed in international surveys about low confidence in the Romanian legislature, reflect the association of parliamentarians with the political corruption discussed in the previous section, and can be partially driven by the criticism brought to the legislature by politicians. People do not trust the parliament for several reasons. First, according to several respondents, the parliament is inactive in defending the Romanian citizens’ interests and “almost powerless in relation with other institutions” (F.N.). Such a criticism is consistent with previous research that indicates a low trust in the Romanian Parliament (Holmberg, Lindberg & Svensson, 2017). Second, the parliament is considered expensive and “discretionary in the way it allocates resources to itself” (M.C.). Several respondents believe that it is impossible to trust and to vote for the members of an institution who “put their own interests before the ones of everybody else, especially in times of crisis” (A.D.). The more senior interviewees argued that their trust in the parliament diminished from one election to the next, but that the last term (2016–20) was so disappointing, they decided not to vote in 2020: When I saw how openly cynical they [the MPs] have become when they voted for their special pensions and for the increase of their own wages while our economy was crumbling, I said: Stop! No more votes from me after 30 years of not missing a single election. (I.Z.)

The MPs’ perceived “hunger for money” is seen concomitant with the “permanent preoccupation to make noise, to disunite the people, to fuel disputes in society” (E.T.). The parliament cannot be trusted also because it is rather a “cheap fairground than a political forum. So, what would be the reason to vote for these guys?” (I.N.). Thus, this institution became “useless, as it eats our money and returns nothing but more taxes and more political scandals” (G.P.). The association of the parliament with a mixture of scandals and corruption seemed to have determined several respondents to stay at home. As one of the most radical respondents explains: “the parliament is not even an empty box, it’s a box full of rats. You don’t vote for rats, you exterminate them. . . .Apologies for my frankness” (J.K.). These comments, in which many respondents report that corruption deters them from voting, are in line with conclusions from the literature. Previous research on Romania indicates the importance of corruption in demobilizing the electorate. The perception of corruption can either depress voting because citizens’ faith in the democratic process decreases (Kostadinova, 2009) or convince voters of incumbent Gherghina et al. | Using the Pandemic as a Pretext

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Based on the 21 interviews, we identified three main reasons for absenteeism in the 2020 national elections: low trust in the parliament and politicians, the vagueness of the political parties’ electoral promises, and the feeling that the results were already known before the elections took place. We also noticed that the pandemic played a marginal role in the decision not to vote, being mostly a pretext rather than an actual reason.

At least all the parties, but especially PNL and PSD, could have tried to convince us that what they proposed made sense. But there was not even the tiniest effort to communicate on the content of their programs (maybe because there was no content at all?); all they did was to blame each other. Under such circumstances, why should I have voted? (S.O.)

One interviewee tried to explain the relation between the quality of the programmatic promises and the level of political attendance: “It is more interesting betting in a cockfight than voting. At least the show is guaranteed, the roosters don’t cheat, you know what is their record and their potential, and you don’t have the impression they believe you’re a sucker” (I.G.). Lack of a Real Stake in Elections

Almost half of the respondents indicated that one of the main reasons for their absenteeism was the fact that the results of the parliamentary elections were known in advance. This observation is in line with the relatively stable character of the Romanian party system in which the two large parties (PSD and PNL) dominate the electoral arena and one of them—or sometimes both—forms government coalitions with smaller parties. According to a majority of the interviewees, the formation of a coalition between PNL, USR, and UDMR was likely or very likely to happen. As one of them puts it, “it was sure 12

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parties to change their preference (Chiru & Gherghina, 2012). Credible anti-corruption efforts can induce electoral manipulation in the country (Klasˇnja & Pop-Eleches, 2022). Moreover, the general and inconsistent political promises of the mainstream parties (PSD and PNL) or newer parties (USR) were mentioned explicitly by most respondents as a reason for not participating in the elections. Some of the interviewees were tired of the approach used by the mainstream parties: “same demagogic speeches about the people and about future development, a development that in fact never comes” (S.O.). People perceive these discourses as being without substance, simply meant to “mislead the Romanians” (D.T.) or “to prevent us thinking freely” (M.F.). The electoral offers are seen as being merely formal, “as they need to write down something in their manifestos” (M.N.). Moreover, the citizens we interviewed are convinced that “even if they write things in manifestos, they do not apply them in practice” (I.Z.). Such opinions also apply to the USR, a party that is relatively new and which gained electoral support in 2016 based on the claims that it intends to do things differently than the mainstream parties (Dragoman, 2021). The interviewees clearly stated that the emptiness of the political discourse during the campaign was among the factors that convinced them to not vote. The absenteeism was perceived by some as an act of resistance “against manipulation” (D.T., S.C.), as a “lesson for them [the politicians] to be learned—they cannot continue to endlessly promise things they don’t have any intention to do” (F.N.), or as “the natural thing to do when you don’t really have what and whom to vote for” (I.L.). Some respondents manifested their perplexity about the parties’ lack of initiative to present their programs:

Nothing changes even if some of the political labels change and some of the MPs migrate. We had them all both in power and in opposition and they did nothing. After PSD, comes PNL and then again PSD, but sometimes the same people switch parties and remain in power. It’s not even worth talking about UDMR since it is always in government. (L.M.)

This conviction that the parties were rather simulating the electoral combat and that the results were easy to anticipate demobilized especially the former PSD voters who were also disappointed by the party leaders’ conduct during their term in government (2017– 19). One of them believed that “it was inevitable to have Iohannis’s party3 leading the future government, so why bother to vote?” (G.P.). Another interviewee showed that “the one who rotates the wheel is not the people but the President, who’s at his turn ‘rotated’ by Brussels. Does it make sense to walk in the snow to cast a useless ballot?” (R.P.). But other respondents who did not favor the social-democrats were also persuaded that no surprise would occur by the end of the December 2020 elections: “One votes in order either to show his support for some party or to prevent the one he despises to win a majority. It was neither of these two cases for me. I knew PNL would govern. No enthusiasm, no funeral either” (I.N.) Limited Role of COVID-19

Very few interviewees voluntarily mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic as one reason, among others, for their non-participation in the parliamentary elections. When specifically asked if COVID-19 played a role in their absenteeism, a couple of other respondents stated that the pandemic could have been one of the reasons. However, when invited to explain in detail what was the exact influence of COVID-19, almost all these respondents admitted that the pandemic was rather a pretext than a real cause for their absence. One of the respondents explicitly argued that “COVID-19 suited very well all those who already flirted with the idea of not going to the polling stations” (S.O.). The pandemic gave them “the ultimate reason to stay at home” without feeling guilty in front of the others and in their own eyes (I.N.). By invoking the virus as the reason citizens did not take part in the elections, the discussion about the other more profound and systemic reasons was easily avoided. In the 3. Klaus Iohannis was the country president at the time of the 2020 legislative elections, and he was the PNL leader before getting elected to public office. He has been associated with the party since 2014.

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that PSD would remain isolated and the other parties would join forces in order to govern together” (A.U.). For some of them, this was “planned many months in advance” (I.G.) and “all the parties accepted it, including PSD, who wanted to let the others break their necks too” (J.K.). The idea that there was an implicit or even an explicit decision mainly between PSD and PNL to let the latter govern, as “it was their turn,” was evoked by six respondents during the interviews. Others blamed the very foreseeable results on the immobility and disconnectedness of the Romanian political parties:

CONCLUSIONS

This article aimed to identify the importance of the COVID-19 pandemic for absenteeism in the 2020 legislative elections in Romania through the eyes of voters. We conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with people who did not vote in these elections but voted in the previous legislative elections in 2016. Our findings reveal that the main reasons for absenteeism are rooted in voters’ long-term attitudes toward the political system and elections. Their low trust in the legislature—and, more broadly, in politicians—is a feature that appears to disengage Romanian voters. The vague pledges of political parties in the 2020 elections made voters consider them as a continuation of previous habits in which parties promise much without concrete avenues and do very little to implement those promises. This approach, labeled by voters as “politics as usual,” minimizes the differences between parties and voters see them as being similar. The third determinant of absenteeism is the perception of a limited stake in these elections: the respondents could correctly anticipate the results, which is reflected in the quotes used in the text, and they were not motivated to vote. They explained that their vote could not make a difference, which is in line with earlier research explaining that people with a low sense of political efficacy rarely participate in elections (Harder & Krosnick, 2008). 14

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words of a younger boycotter: “We could say the virus is guilty for all this—the political mess and our attitude about the elections—but honestly we know that what is wrong is entrenched down there, in the system, and we cannot get rid of it” (A.M.). For several interviewees, the virus was a real threat, but the polling stations were not a more favorable environment for spreading the virus than other closed milieus such as buses, markets, or churches (G.P.). Another respondent went further and referred to the “hypocrisy” of fellow citizens “who claim they don’t vote as they are afraid of COVID-19, but who instead spend their Sundays inside the crowded shopping malls” (O.M.). The respondents who emphasize that the pandemic could have been used as an acceptable reason to abstain from voting make an important claim for a principle of representation. To them, the pandemic decreased the perceived social costs of breaking a social norm or expected civic duty. This easy-to-use excuse was a valid justification for not turning up at the polls rather than explaining that they did not vote because of their political views or expectations regarding performance in office. Several respondents appreciated that COVID-19 might have affected the other nonvoters much more than themselves in their decision to stay at home on Election Day. Other respondents believed that the others might also pretend to be afraid of the virus, “but that nobody could know if this was indeed the cause of their electoral nonparticipation” (D.T.). In any case, many interviewees considered that the other absentees were much more likely to invoke COVID-19 to stay home, while as far as their own behavior was concerned, there was no place for ambiguity: “Let me be crystal clear on this point: I really don’t need to find in the pandemic an excuse for the fact I stayed at home that Sunday. I did it on purpose to show there was nothing to vote for” (L.M.).

FIN A N CIAL SU P P OR T

Work for this study was supported by the Romanian Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI), project number: PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019-0460. Corresponding author email: [email protected] Published online: April 28, 2023 REF ER ENCES

Aberbach, J. D. (1969) Alienation and political behaviour. American Political Science Review. 63 (1), 86–99. Banducci, S. & Karp, J. (2003) How elections change the way citizens view the political system: Campaigns, media effects and electoral outcomes in comparative perspective. British Journal of Political Science. 33 (3), 443–467. Gherghina et al. | Using the Pandemic as a Pretext

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The COVID-19 pandemic did not appear to influence people’s absenteeism but was sometimes used mainly as a pretext to stay at home. Many respondents were aware about the three main categories of factors related to the pandemic, which were revealed by previous research: fear of the virus, new conditions for in-person voting, and the vulnerability of specific social groups. Some interviewees used one or two of these features as excuses not to vote, but the real motivations were different. These were rooted in the frustration and dissatisfaction toward the political system and elites. The findings of our article have broader implications beyond the single-case study analyzed here. We show that the pandemic can have a different function than the one illustrated in previous studies. While it can inhibit voter turnout in specific settings, the pandemic can be also used as pretext for a behavior that is in practice driven by deeper political attitudes. Such an observation cam be useful in further research seeking to understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on voters. Voters see beyond their concerns about the pandemic when deciding if they will participate or not. This contributes to the strand of literature speaking about the sophistication of citizens in engaging politically. In Romania, the decision not to vote was not driven by emotions (e.g., fear of getting or spreading the virus) caused by temporary or short-term events like the pandemic. Instead, the long-term attitudes built partially on cognitive processes, including political past performance, are relevant. Further research can build on these findings and expand the universe of cases to other political settings (countries) to provide more robust findings about the role of pandemics in voter behavior. Moreover, future studies could explore the explanatory potential of economic factors such as state welfare or individual financial stability, which were not addressed by our analysis. The COVID19 pandemic had many costs for ordinary citizens, which could result in political behavior. The identification of economic incentives for absenteeism could complement the political perspective provided in this work and provide a different theoretical anchor to people’s decisions not to vote during the pandemic. n

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APPENDIX. THE GUIDE USED FOR SEMI-STRUCTURED-INTERVIEWS

1. What motivated your participation to the December 2016 parliamentary elections? Please refer to the most relevant reasons for your participation. 2. Can you please tell why you did participate in the December 2020 parliamentary elections? Please refer to the most relevant reasons. Scenario A: The interviewee mentioned the pandemic, COVID-19, or the virus as the reason for the absence in the elections.

3. Was COVID-19 the primary reason for not voting in the election? Or was it just one of the reasons among others? If so, please state your other reasons. And please elaborate on your behavior regarding the participation in the last elections. Scenario B: The interviewee does not mention the pandemic, COVID-19, or the virus as the reason for the absence in the elections.

4. Please elaborate on the reasons for your absence. 5. Nevertheless, although you didn’t mention Covid as a reason for your absence, didn’t it count to any extent in your decision not to take part in the elections? If it counted to some extent, could you explain how it did influence your behavior regarding participation in the last elections? 6. Who influenced in a decisive manner your decision to stay home?

 If respondents did not refer explicitly to the following categories, we asked about them: family members, your professional environment, TV, radio, social media? 7. When approximately did you make the decision not to vote? 8. What is your opinion about the parliament? What about political parties? Please freely explain your points of view. Note: Question 3 was asked only in scenario A, while questions 4 and 5 were asked only in scenario B. All other questions were asked to all respondents.

Gherghina et al. | Using the Pandemic as a Pretext

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