Searching for Candor in Politics: Transparency in Post-communist Romania

• In Event: Society for Romanian Studies

Abstract

The crisis of representative democracy aims above all at the fundamental incapacity to articulate the principle of "sovereignty of the people" and the erosion of the ideal of self-government (Dahl 1999, Mair 2013, Rosanvallon 2008, Poguntke et al., 2015). The symbolic redemption of the active citizen has often been attributed to his ability to closely oversee the political scene, to examine the activity of political leaders, and to denounce the excesses of power (Rosanvallon 2009, Green, 2009, Galligan 2013, 2018). The transparent state becomes a normative political requirement (Gutmann and Thompson, 1996: 95), a promise for better governance (Schneider, 2013), and also a solution to overcome political pathologies (Heald, 2006, O'Neill, 2006, Grimmelikhuijsen, 2012, Meijer et al., 2012). New democracies have apparently hastened to embrace this solution, adopting many reforms. Political transparency has consequently become a mechanism for political legitimization within the larger framework of redefining the social values needed for both traditional constitutionalism and morality in politics (Sajo 1998, Kornai & Rose-Ackerman 2004). The paradox of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) seems to be that, despite the adoption of many preventive mechanisms and international “good practices”, they continue to be dominated by "Frankenstate", “hybrid regime” characteristics (normative eclecticism, instrumentalism, selectivity Smilov 2010, Schepele 2013, Sadurski 2018) and political and economic informality (Holman & Luneburg 2012, Ledeneva 2013, 2018).
I analyze the vagaries of democracy in the Romanian case, using a relatively understudied approach - the deconstruction of political conflicts created around the institutions of transparency (as institutions meant to transform citizens into active censors of political power, capable of applying sanctions and resisting authoritarian impulses Green, 2009, Rosanvallon, 2009: 258). Whether there is already a rich literature on the overall effectiveness of prevention systems in the area of good political practice (Fox, 2007, Fine Licht et al., 2014, Stadelmann et al, 2014, Grimmelikhuijsen & Kasymova, 2015; Porumbescu et al., 2017), few studies have sought to understand forms of local resistance to new institutions of political accountability. I start from the premise that there is an established competition between traditional institutions of political control (i.e. parliament, political parties) and new mechanisms that are supposed to bring more political accountability. I propose to identify the (contradictory) arguments raised by the MPs in the debates on the creation of new integrity institutions. I will attempt to answer a series of questions about 'politics made visible' through a moderate constructivism approach (Monier et al., 2014, de Graaf et al., 2010, Kroeze 2016): how did transparency institutions emerge in the Romanian case and especially how did the classical institutions of political accountability (notably the parliament, and the political parties represented in parliament) report on the creation of new transparency bodies? The empirical analysis will focus mainly on the Romanian case taken as an example of a "problematic" democracy following the latest reforms of the judiciary and numerous political scandals (Coman, 2014; Hein, 2015, Mendelski, 2018)

Author

• Alexandra Iancu, University of Bucharest