Online Negative Campaign in the 2004 Romanian Presidential Elections

The 2004 electoral campaign marks the beginning of internet use in the political communication in Romania. It has also been the first campaign that resorts to negative communication via online tools. The main actors of this negative campaign, motivated and involved in it by the strategic planners and PR specialists, were the sympathizers of the DA Alliance. Its communication consultants launched an online platform on their candidate’s website on which the party members and sympathizers could upload electoral materials. The funnier and more depreciative the electoral materials regarding the Social Democratic Party (SDP) counter-candidate were, the more visible they were online, being sent through email, through visited blogs or viewed on video-sharing websites. As a space dedicated to the freedom of expression, situated beyond any official (state) censorship, the online environment became the space where the DA Alliance sympathizers got actively involved in its campaign. One of the fundamental reasons was that the prime minister in 2004 (a SDP member) was easy to be mocked at and treated on internet as if he were a peer of the DA Alliance voters. This pseudo-democratization transformed the DA Alliance candidate and its communication strategic planners into winners

Downplaying Euroscepticism in Mainstream Media: The Schengen Accession of Romania and Bulgaria

Scholars have expressed concern about the growth of Eurosceptic discourses in the media since Taggart's (1998) article on Euroscepticism. While some progress has been made in understanding the media's role in increasing Euroscepticism, previous studies have primarily focused on Western European media discourses. This research aims to address the knowledge gap on Eurosceptic discourse in Eastern Europe by analysing the impact of the veto against Romania and Bulgaria’s application to join Schengen, as reflected in mainstream media. The research question is: To what extent the Eurosceptic discourse arose in both countries in the weeks before and after the Justice and Home Affairs Council (8–9 December 2022)? The findings indicate that mainstream-mediated discourse employed a strategy of downplaying Euroscepticism. The Romanian and Bulgarian political class labelled the failure to join Schengen as "disappointing," "unfair," "unjustified," and "regrettable." This research provides evidence of how mainstream media discourses addressed the issue while promoting the European integration project by minimising Euroscepticism

'Yes We Vote': Civic mobilisation and impulsive engagement on Instagram.

Social media have become increasingly central to civic mobilisation and protest movements around the world. Emotions, symbols, self-presentation and visual communication are emerging as key components of networked individualism and connective action by affective publics challenging established political norms. These emerging repertoires have the potential to reignite civic engagement, although their coherence and sustainability have been questioned. We explore these phenomena through an examination of Instagram use during the 2014 Romanian presidential election. Voting irregularities during the 1st round, particularly affecting the diaspora, gave rise to an impulsive civic movement utilising social media to express solidarity and drive turnout in the 2nd round. Using an original coding framework, we look at how narratives of identity, community and engagement were visually constructed by users on Instagram; the activities, settings, spaces, objects and emotions that comprised this multi-authored story. Our analysis reveals the creation of a loose “me too” collective: an emotionally charged hybrid of self-presentation and participation in a shared moment of historic significance, which otherwise lacked particular norms, political agendas or hierarchies. The civic movement on Instagram materialised primarily through photos documenting the act of voting; an imagined community that combined co-presence in physical space with virtual solidarity through photos of ballots, flags and landmarks. The platform appears to favour impulsive, symbolic and affective expression rather than rational or critical dialogue. As in other cases of post-systemic grassroots engagement, individuals came together for a short period of time and expressed the need for change, although this remained largely an abstract signifier

Online Negative Campaign in the 2004 Romanian Presidential Elections

The 2004 electoral campaign marks the beginning of internet use in the political communication in Romania. It has also been the first campaign that resorts to negative communication via online tools. The main actors of this negative campaign, motivated and involved in it by the strategic planners and PR specialists, were the sympathizers of the DA Alliance2. Its communication consultants launched an online platform on their candidate’s website on which the party members and sympathizers could upload electoral materials. The funnier and more depreciative the electoral materials regarding the Social Democratic Party (SDP) counter-candidate were, the more visible they were online, being sent through email, through visited blogs or viewed on video-sharing websites. As a space dedicated to the freedom of expression, situated beyond any official (state) censorship, the online environment became the space where the DA Alliance sympathizers got actively involved in its campaign. One of the fundamental reasons was that the prime minister in 2004 (a SDP member) was easy to be mocked at and treated on internet as if he were a peer of the DA Alliance voters. This pseudo-democratization transformed the DA Alliance candidate and its communication strategic planners into winners

Dimitrie Gusti și evitarea capcanei fasciste (Dimitrie Gusti and the avoidance of the fascist trap)

Similar to the intellectuals of his generation, Dimitrie Gusti has encountered the fascist trap within his life history since the 1920s when Benito Mussolini took over the power in Italy. However, Gusti avoided slipping into this trap ever in his life. Certainly, it is a well-known fact that some members of the Sociological School of Bucharest have become legionaries, while others fancied the communist or fascist movement. The fundamental feature of the Sociological School was that it allowed all the young intellectuals – legionaries, socialists, nationalists or Europeanists – to cooperate within the research teams as long as they were preoccupied by the Sociology of the Nation and the Monography of the Romanian villages. In this study I intend to demonstrate that Gusti provided the diligent young people with a scientific alternative, while they were tempted by the political extremes of that time: communism or fascism. I shall prove that Gusti has never proposed or supported a fascist model of development, even though the Romanian sociologist declared that he was impressed by Mussolini’s fascist movement. On the contrary, Gusti has permanently promoted the raise of the Romanian nation based on the model proposed by philosopher Saint Simon, according to whom the scholars have the mission to stimulate local communities, or to influence public policies. I used the method of representative biography, as well as the oral history interviews conducted by professor Zoltán Rostás with people who participated at the monographic campaigns coordinated by Gusti in 1925-1931 and during 1935-1943. The analysis reflects that Gusti’s School and the members who remained faithful to his sociological conception rather competed with the Legionary Movement. Being close to the regime of Karl II, Gusti’s School envisioned a Social Monarchy for the second part of the 1930s, being focused on uplifting the living level of the many, of the Romanian peasants

Candidaţii populişti şi noile tehnologii (Blog, Facebook, YouTube) în alegerile prezidenţiale din 2009

The main hypothesis of the study The populist candidates and the new technologies (Blog, Facebook, YouTube) in the 2009 presidential elections is that populist candidates display a bigger interest for the new technologies than the other candidates. The online campaign of the 12 presidential candidates has been monitored on social networks (Facebook), blogs and on content-oriented networks (Youtube). The research method was content analysis. The result of the analysis answered the question on whether the online environment was used by the candidates at the 2009 presidential elections for political debate or just for promoting themselves

New Media and Social Media in the Political Communication

This study presents the 2009 Romanian presidential elections and the way in which thecandidates interacted with the new communication technologies. After the first research conducted on the2004 online electoral campaigns, we noticed that, in Romania, the degree of alphabetization and politicalparticipation (the number of people knowing how to read and write, or the number of those effectivelyparticipating at the poll) is just as small as it was after the mass internet was introduced and after thenumber of internet subscribers increased. We observed that the websites and blogs with the highest trafficare the entertainment dedicated ones, the tabloids, and not the cultural ones, not the quality online press.This research intends to clear up whether in Romania social media are rather helping the moderatecandidates or the extremist candidates – from an electoral point of view. This article will be incorporated inthe research called Electoral Communication in Romania after 1989. Old and New Technologies inPresidential Campaigns which is part of the post-doctoral program POSDRU/89/1.5/S/62259, Sociohumanand political applied sciences. Post-doctoral training program and post-doctoral researchscholarships in the field of the socio-human and political sciences

Electoral process nullification: the reasons behind voting for a dead candidate

Voting for a candidate that is no longer alive at the time of election may be considered a wasted vote. Nevertheless, there are instances in which such a vote means to overcome the legal limitations and choose how to be represented. This article aims to illustrate how such a behavior can be calculated when citizens vote for a dead candidate to nullify an electoral law that they consider unfair. This is driven by what we call electoral process nullification, which is the political equivalent of jury nullification. We use evidence from the local elections organized in September 2020 in a Romanian commune of approximately 3,000 inhabitants. A dead candidate won the elections with 64% of the votes. Our results draw on semi-structured interviews with people who voted for that candidate

Not so Intimate Instagram : Images of Swedish Political Party Leaders in the 2018 National Election Campaign

The visual components of political communication are closely related tothe ongoing personalization of politics. Not only do the media focus theirstories on candidates and leaders, but also the parties’own work with theelectoral campaigns and political propaganda have an increasing focus onthe individual candidates and leaders. This study focuses on how politicalparty leaders chose to use visual images in their self-presentation onInstagram during the 2018 general election in Sweden. This is donethrough a quantitative content analysis of party leaders’posts during thelast three weeks before Election Day.The results do not confirm an increasing level of personalization of politics.Party leaders were visually exposed in an innovative way, but still mainlywithin rather predictable campaign contexts. General social media standardshave been developed by political parties also on this platform. When applyingto these standards branding and long-term party strategy considerationsseem to be more important than possible short-term effects of exposing sur-prising personal and emotional characteristics of the party leader