When cultural strength means political weakness: Romania’s marriage referendum and the paradox of conservative mobilisation

Abstract

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.

Territorial and Electorate Size Influence: Participation/Competitiveness in Costa Rica’s 2016 Local Scale Elections

“…Our article suggests that there are important geographic factors to be considered in electoral analysis. If temporal effect is one of the possible reasons to explain electoral behavior (Kostadinova and Power, 2007) we believe space is also necessary to understand the political phenomena (Taylor and Johnston, 1979;Racu et al 2020). Considering geographic space as absolute, relative, and relational (Harvey 2012), we do not deny the contributions of John Agnew and many other geographers who have argued that the geographical context needs to be considered in electoral analyses.…”