Romania lacks a Local Democracy Barometer

Barometer perspective by RangiferOnTheRoof (via Flickr)

Up until now, in Romania, we were familiar with the national development plans that the EU demands according to the Cohesion Policy. These national plans indicate the economic and social development discrepancies from within regions, from one county to another and from one town to another. Creating development plans is done very carefully by the government, with the participation of all the non-governmental parties interested. The methodology is treated with care because it is the basis for further investments to mitigate the development delay at the local level. All relevant parties know what they have to do, and the plan replaces a guide for authorities and society. According to the plan, further efforts will be invested in common projects and actions. Development is too important to be done spontaneously.

Why aren’t there similar practices in the case of democracy in Romania? Why shouldn’t we have a plan to improve the quality of democracy at the local level, which would guide and reunite the efforts of all the interested parties? And why are we still missing a standard tool to evaluate the degree of democracy from one county to another and from one region to another, using a democracy barometer?

The degree of democracy is not the same in Romania, as it is in other countries and we should take time to investigate how Romania compares to other nations around the world. There are some elements related to historic evolution, economic and social structure that make the level of democracy vary both within a country and across the world. The key elements of a democracy – such as free and fair electionsImproving transparency in elections and maintaining the independence of electoral commissions is vital for promoting trust in the electoral system, preventing electoral fraud, and upholding the democr..., access to information, relations between citizens and the administration – are manifested at local levels and need to be evaluated qualitatively, if we want to achieve a more formal assessment of the minimal conditions for democracy. The results of this barometer could provide directions of action for problematic aspects and could be introduced in a national democratic development plan, assumed by all parties, from local and national politicians to politically active people.

This would be the beginning of truly open governance not only in Romania, but throughout the globe. Governments must understand that they cannot govern alone and without citizens, just as citizens are unable to improve the situation without the authorities  The barometer would provide clear objectives for governments to work to achieve, whilst working together with citizens to reach these common objectives. Up until now, it was rare to evaluate  the quality of democracy and when it was performed, it was unscientific and inconsistent. Assessment of the quality of democracy on local level is done unevenly and sporadically, usually only in the period of local elections, and is characterized by certain features: The attempts to measure the quality of the activity of local administration based on the use of the law of free access to public information (Law no. 544/2001) still faces a lack of answers, even after 11 years from its enforcement. Local communities are still being ignored because comparative studies are often based on analysing large cities and municipalities. The small communities are taken into consideration only through case studies or in general studies to measure the perception. Previous initiatives to create regularly published indicators have not passed the pilot stage. In the past, several initiatives to build municipal indexes existed, such as the Non-Governmental Organization’s Europeanness index (2005) or projects that qualitatively measured the democratic values applied in Romania, such as the one implemented by the Life Quality Research Institute (2002).

None of the previous initiatives were updated and made it past the pilot stage. Such initiatives don’t have the support from the representatives of local public administrations and, as such, often a majority are failing to respond effectively to providing data, a key element to these types of studies. At local level, in some communities, politicians understand that the efforts to evaluate local democracy could negatively impact them and they could be blamed for the democratic deficits (this could be used as a negative campaign in elections), especially when the public would compare the local deficits with the democratic performance in other communities. Everyone should assume and understand that the results are useful to help the community move forward though.  However, the Barometer would not show the positive implications to the end unless we can talk about collective action, supported by all relevant actors in community.

A local Democracy Barometer could provide important information to authorities  citizens and civil society. It would be primarily useful to citizens voting in those counties as they will be able to compare the quality of their own local authorities to that of those in other counties and, then, vote accordingly. The tool could also be useful to local authorities, who can share best practices for governing and promoting democracy. Journalists could also make use of the data, by being able to identify key topics to report on. Academia will also be able to use the report to perform comparative studies. Civil society could evaluate and confront authorities, using the information to identify democracy deficiencies. In spite of all that, citizens lack an evaluation tool, an audit tool for the democracy level within local authorities and for comparison with the performance of other counties. Often, local communities do not evolve at the same pace or in the same way. For example, there are still major differences in the Romanian regions in terms of democratic and institutional development. The degree of democracy is not uniform, but varies from one county to another. Thus, before we begin any effort to make states better, an evaluation is needed to assess the quality of local democracy. If we want to increase the overall quality of democracy, we first need to identify its local deficits because quality of democracy is all about local communities.