THE INFLUENCE OF THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM ON THE QUALITY OF THE ELECTORAL PREDICTIONS: ROMANIAN ELECTIONS: 1992 - 2009
THE INFLUENCE OF THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM ON THE QUALITY OF THE ELECTORAL PREDICTIONS: ROMANIAN ELECTIONS: 1992 - 2009

Summary/Abstract: East Europe is a color stain of the „old” Europe. Here, the dynamism in which the changes take place, makes this part of Europe an extremely interesting one for researchers. In the process of modernizing the post communist political systems, states try out a large spectrum of democratic consolidation patterns in a relatively short time, searching for the right one. In Romania, the change of the electoral system was the subject of many disputes, starting with the reasons which justify the change and continuing until the final form. An interesting part of this discussion, concerns the polls. It was presumed that simultaneous with the introduction of the majoritarian system, the accuracy of the electoral predictions will decrease due to the complexity of the new reality. The communist regime in Romania brought significant mutations at society level. After decades of delay, the polls hardly made a place in the Romanian society’s mentality and not rarely / infrequently they are in the center of live disputes in Romanian society. Also among the population but also among the elites, the polls were and still are viewed as manipulation instruments. It was hard to understand what a poll is, what it’s limits are, how to interpret the data resulted, but maybe the hardest thing was to understand how, by questioning a small percentage of people you could understand what the whole country’s opinion was. Even though 20 years have passed since polls are a part of our public life, the question „Can we trust public polls” echos as often as it did two decades ago. The rule is that immediately after the publication of the poll results waves of criticism appear and the exception are polls very little disputed. The most recent elections in 2009 were no exception. This time the most disputed results were those from exit-polls in the second round, when 3 out of 4 institutions indicated as winner the candidate who came out second. Charges of manipulation, partisanship or lack of professionalism and ethics were the basis of ample press articles, TV shows or online discussions. The question that rises is: does the dynamics of electoral predictions performances have anything to do with the type of electoral system? The hypothesis of the study is that, in the case of elections which use a majoritarian system, the accuracy of electoral predictions will be greater than in the case of the elections in a proportional system.

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