Voting Patterns and Social Cleavages in the 2014 Presidential Election in Romania's Region of Banat

Abstract

This article aims to provide an introduction to an electoral sociology of regional specificity, because it covers only the Banat region; this article does not aim to extend its findings over other geographical areas, even if some of its findings could be applied on a larger scale. In the last 25 years of democratic regime, the region of Banat consisted of a somehow different electoral behavior compared to other regions, even though the general evolution of political orientation is consistent with the same general tendency in the Romanian society. The subject of this study is to analyze the electoral behavior of this region’s population in the 2014 Presidential election, using at times an interdisciplinary approach based on electoral geography, cultural history, social statistics and political science