Held on 6–7 October 2018, the Romanian referendum on the topic of gay marriage was the fourth referendum of this kind organised in East Central Europe over a five-year period. Because turnout was low in all of them and demands explanation, this paper: i) discusses the common characteristics of these Eastern European marriage referendums, contextualising the Romanian referendum; ii) overviews the history of the Romanian referendum, emphasising the legal, political, ideological and societal aspects; iii) quantitatively examines the electoral geography of the voting patterns; and iv) interprets qualitative data seeking to understand the voters’ choices and why conservative mobilisation was so weak.
The requirement of a participation quorum for validity makes non-voting in referendums an important type of voting behaviour. This article seeks to explain non-voting in a referendum where the expectation was to have high turnout but where in reality only few voted, i.e. the 2018 referendum on the topic of same-sex marriage in Romania. Our explanations are inspired by the literature on turnout on elections to which we add several specific features of referendums. We propose three major sets of factors derived from the literature: access to resources, strategic decisions and campaign issues. The analysis relies on 36 semistructured interviews with individuals aged 18 and above conducted in several urban and rural localities throughout Romania between December 2018 and March 2019.
This paper discusses the religious dimension of the public debate concerning the public health measures adopted by the Romanian authorities during the pandemic and focuses on the role played by the Romanian Orthodox Church within this context. It delineates the different camps that were formed within the Church in this regard and traces their evolution throughout the pandemic. It contextualizes the position of the Church in order to better understand it, placing it within the broader context of the Romanian society during the pandemic and integrating it within the longer history of post-communist relations between the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Romanian state and the Romanian civil society. It analyses the political impact of the public health measures and the role of the Church in shaping this impact. Finally, starting from the Romanian experience of the pandemic and from the ideological, theological and political disputes that it has generated within the Romanian public sphere, it develops some general conclusions regarding the relation between faith, science and politics whose relevance, if proven valid, surpasses the Romanian context and thus contributes to a more ecumenical discussion regarding the theological, pastoral and political lessons that can be learned from an otherwise tragic experience.
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