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Positivism has been the dominant paradigm across the social sciences. Its quasi-monopoly has been broken only in the last several decades when with the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s grounbreaking study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), other meta-theoretical stances have managed to assert themselves. From the 1980s onwards, the field of International Relations (IR) has witnessed the emergence of a reflectivist current characterized by the embrace of post-positivism. Reflectivist theories – from postst...

In 1990, Romania opted for an electoral system of proportional representation (PR) which remained in place until the 2004 elections. During this time, every electoral cycle had been marked by different reforms and/or amendments to the electoral law. The electoral reform from 2008 and the subsequent transition to an alleged single-member majority electoral system (SMP) – which still retained a major component of proportionality – occurred in an environment characterized by a sense of profound disappointment with th...

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the electoral reforms that have been performed in Romania in the last 25 years, in order to identify their effects, which have been, in some cases, harmful to the already difficult process of transition to democracy. We base our working hypothesis on the assumption that the large number of these reforms, as well as, in some cases, their ambiguity and/or complexity, represented important criteria which led to a constant decrease in the population's voting participation a...