Stable or Fluid? Making Sense of Party System Changes in Post-Communist Romania

Previous research on Romanian politics revealed an empirical paradox regarding party system stability. On the one hand, the number of political parties stabilized in the most recent decade and betweenc1992 and 2012 there were no new entries on the parliamentary arena. On the other hand, the level of electoral volatility continued to be high irrespectively of measurement issues and range of countries included in the comparison.We aim to see to what extent this discrepancy can be considered a measurement artifact that may be related to difficulties to capture dynamics in the life cycle of parties and inter-party dynamics in the seven elections since 1990.Therefore, we produce concise and comprehensive narratives that investigate the ‘fate' of all political parties receiving more than 1% of the votes in post-communist Romania. We first place these developments in relation to the main characteristics of the political arena (institutional aspects related to the electoral system, party regulation and semi-presidentialism, as well as historical legacies and international influences). In the second section, we focus on continuities related to organizational aspects – splits, mergers and name changes – and in the third section on continuities and discontinuities related to electoral alliances and parliamentary behaviour