When policies make (up for) politics: a view from Romania

Abstract

The paper attempts to offer a rather sketchy analysis of Romanian postcommunist politics with the help of Theodore J. Lowi typology of political processes. The collapse of communism can be seen as a sudden disorganization of the patterns of both constituent and regulative processes set up during the communist rule, annihilating by the same token the redistributive capacities of the political system and reordering the logics of its distributive policies. Striving to rearrange the postcommunist constituent arena in order to become the political subjects of the new regime, parties in the making formulated a sequence of operational definitions of democracy while engaging in distributive processes as vectors of their own organizational production. However, these constituent blueprints proved to be constantly caught in the trap of the interplay of the other processes, especially in the collision of the regulative and the distributive ones. So, quite rapidly, Romanian party and democratic politics became less the agent of the transformation and more the byproduct of an erratic and ungoverned political change.