The 2009 Romanian Presidential Elections: Voter Turnout and Electoral Behaviour in Constanta
The 2009 Romanian Presidential Elections: Voter Turnout and Electoral Behaviour in Constanta

Summary/Abstract: In Romania, the presidential elections of 2009 were held on 22nd November and on 6th December. In the present paper, our approach regarding this matter is a comparative one: we are interested in the results obtained at the national level, in order to compare them to the ones obtained in the county and municipality of Constanta and to gain a more complex picture of the particularities of the voter turnout and the electoral behaviour in this area. The main hypothesis of our study depends on the correlation between the split vote and the relation between a party’s ideological orientation or political programme and the individual characteristics of the candidates when it comes to choosing whom to vote for. In this sense, we refer to a series of classical studies in the field of electoral sociology which explain the split vote through the tension between the political identification and people’s fundamental political attitudes. The methodology used in order to investigate the mentioned research issuess, is necessarily a pluralistic one, but we will mainly focus in our work on a comparative analysis of the ballots that were cast in the county and municipality of Constanta, for which we have especially used electoral data and statistics gathered from the National Institute of Statistics, from the Constanta County Statistics Office, from the Central Electoral Bureau and from the Permanent Electoral Authority.

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