Elita politică românească din Transilvania (1861-1881). O perspectivă alternativă
Romanian Political Elite from Transylvania (1861-1881). An Alternative Perspective

Summary/Abstract: The historiography of the Romanian national movement from Transylvania and Hungary underlined, decades ago, the power shifts that took place between 1865 and 1869 among the ecclesiastical and laic leaders of the Romanian political elite. But no study went further to investigate the entire process, whose length vastly exceeds the previously mentioned four years. The main goal of our research was to evaluate, for each elective cycle inside that time period, the balance between clergymen and laymen in the top structures of the national movement and, after 1869, of the Romanian National Party from Transylvania. By having a clear statistic view of the clerical and laic deputies’ ratio, along with the cartographic projection of their geographical extraction areas, one can reach interesting conclusions on the subject, outrunning the simplistic approach of evolutive-organic path from a clerical ruling towards a laic one. As a secondary goal, we also aim to offer a renewed perspective on the role played by confessionalism in the split between de partisans of activism and passivism. The conclusions highlight, from a statistical and sociological point of view, the leadership tendencies atop the Romanian national movement, the denominational balance between Orthodoxes and Greek Catholics and its impact on the electoral tactics. Also, graphs and map represent a novelty in the field of the national movement research and we assume they improve the quality and ease the understanding of our approach.

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