Abstract
Deputies in representative assemblies constitute, symbolically at least, the broad mass contact necessary for ideological consistency in Communist Party states; they allow the claim from the party leadership that centralism is pursued and maintained only from a democratic ‘base’. The participation by citizens as deputies in local people’s councils and national assemblies, in other words, is necessary for communist governments as long as the image of representation is useful for the party. The following analysis probes the relationship of a communist government with the citizens it rules in one such system, the Socialist Republic of Romania. As a ‘window’ through which to view such a relationship, data from interviews with local-level deputies will be the empirical core of this chapter.
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Notes
This chapter is a revised version of an essay published as ‘Citizen participation in Romania: the people’s council deputy’ in Daniel N. Nelson (ed.), Local Politics in Communist Countries. Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1980.
Daniel Nelson, Democratic Centralism in Romania (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); see particularly Chapter II, where socio-economic comparisons are made.
See the list of organisations included in FUS in Scinteia Tineretulti, 20 December 1968, p. 1.
See Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania pe drumul construirii societaţii socialiste multilateral dezvoltate, vol. 5 (Bucharest: Editura Politica, 1971) p. 505.
Nistor Prisca, Democratismul sistemului Electoral in Republica Socialista Romania (Bucharest: Editura Politica, 1975) pp. 54–5.
Ioan Vida, Deputatul-Împuternicit şi Factor Mobilizator al Cetǎţenilor (Bucharest: Editura Politica, 1973) p. 12; well over half of MAN deputies have backgrounds listed as ‘workers or peasants’, but this is by no means their present occupation.
A number of developments since the mid-1970s, however, may have somewhat increased the MAN’s potential contribution in this respect: a permanent body to analyse the socio-economic development of local units and to examine and refine all bills relating to such matters, the Legislative Council, was set up in 1975, and the two annual sessions of the assembly have become longer. There is also a developing committee structure. See Ion Vintu, ‘Une période nouvelle au cours du développement de la démocratie socialiste en Roumanie’, Revue Roumaine des Sciences Sociales, 20, no. 2 (1976) pp. 181–5.
L. W. Milbrath, Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965) pp. 13ff.
These qualities of participation in a democratic political system are mentioned by Alexander J. Groth in Comparative Politics: A Distributive Approach (New York: Macmillan, 1971) p. 28.
Sidney Tarrow, ‘The urban-rural cleavage in political involvement’, American Political Science Review, 65 (June 1971) pp. 341–57.
Norman H. Nie, G. B. Powell and K. Prewitt, ‘Social structure and political participation: developmental relationships’, 2 parts, American Political Science Review, 63 (June and September 1969).
See Frederic J. Fleron, ‘Co-optation as a mechanism of adaptation to change: the Soviet political leadership system’, Polity, 2 (1969) pp. 176–201.
Stephen Fischer-Galati, The New Romania (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970) p. 39.
Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) pp. 33–5, especially Huntington’s citation of Deutsch, p. 33.
See the conclusions offered in Stephen White, ‘Communist systems and the “iron law of pluralism”’, British Journal of Political Science, 8 (January 1978)
Daniel N. Nelson, ‘Political convergence: an empirical assessment’, World Politics, 30 (April 1978).
For a fuller discussion of central control over local political life, see Daniel N. Nelson, ‘Vertical integration and political control in Eastern Europe’, Slavic Review (forthcoming, 1981.)
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© 1982 Daniel N. Nelson and Stephen Leonard White
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Nelson, D. (1982). People’s Council Deputies in Romania. In: Nelson, D., White, S. (eds) Communist Legislatures in Comparative Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06086-3_4
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