Abstract There are important differences between all Eastern European countries regarding the implementation of pension system privatization. The differences regarding the political configuration between the countries from Eastern Europe might be a possible explanation for the amount of diversity in this area. The ideology of political parties that form or sustain the government that implements the reform can also be an explanation, but this influence must be studied beyond the cliché that stipulates that the right-wing parties will support the public pension system reform and the left-wing parties will oppose it. Armeanu (2010a) showed that there are countries where privatization was supported by the centre-left coalitions that needed to overpass a strong opposition made by the right-wing parties. Using the Ideal Point Estimation technique within the voting sessions related to pension reform during the last three Romanian legislatures, we will explain the formation of pro and against coalitions regarding the pension reform from Romania during the privatization process of public pension system. We also test the hypotheses of the model presented by Armeanu (2010a, 2010b), model that predicts the behaviour of political parties based on the position they have on a two-dimensional space related to the costs of pension reform.
{"title":"The Romanian Pension System Reforms: Evidences from Legislative Roll Call Analysis","authors":"Claudiu Barbu","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2016-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2016-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract There are important differences between all Eastern European countries regarding the implementation of pension system privatization. The differences regarding the political configuration between the countries from Eastern Europe might be a possible explanation for the amount of diversity in this area. The ideology of political parties that form or sustain the government that implements the reform can also be an explanation, but this influence must be studied beyond the cliché that stipulates that the right-wing parties will support the public pension system reform and the left-wing parties will oppose it. Armeanu (2010a) showed that there are countries where privatization was supported by the centre-left coalitions that needed to overpass a strong opposition made by the right-wing parties. Using the Ideal Point Estimation technique within the voting sessions related to pension reform during the last three Romanian legislatures, we will explain the formation of pro and against coalitions regarding the pension reform from Romania during the privatization process of public pension system. We also test the hypotheses of the model presented by Armeanu (2010a, 2010b), model that predicts the behaviour of political parties based on the position they have on a two-dimensional space related to the costs of pension reform.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67315971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Recent demographic changes such as ageing, low-fertility, and large out-migration from Eastern European countries, brought into discussion the vivid question of the future of intergenerational solidarity within families. In the context of increasing geographical mobility of young people in search for better paid jobs, the unmet need for personal assistance among the elderly, the underdeveloped system of care services, Romania knows new dynamics of intergenerational support. Contrary to perspectives that consider spatial proximity between adult children and their elder parents the indisputable enabling factor for intergenerational support transfers (Rossi and Rossi, 1990), emerging literature on transnational families highlights that such tight kinship relations continue to exist even across borders (Baldassar et al., 2007). Using recent data from the nationwide survey “The Impact of Migration on Older Parents Left Behind in Romania” (2011), this paper examines the complex dynamics of intergenerational solidarity involving adult children as transnational migrants and their elder parents who remain at home. The statistical models used indicate the migrants’ role as providers of remittances, but also the ways in which other forms of support are distributed among the dyads. Despite a possible presupposition that parents who were left at home might only be beneficiaries of support, the data show the opposite: elderly persons, depending on their age, were active providers of help as well.
最近的人口变化，如老龄化、低生育率和东欧国家的大量外迁，带来了家庭内代际团结未来的生动问题的讨论。在年轻人为寻找报酬更高的工作而日益增加的地域流动性、老年人对个人援助的需要未得到满足、护理服务系统不发达的情况下，罗马尼亚了解代际支助的新动态。与认为成年子女与其年长父母之间的空间接近是代际支持转移无可争议的促成因素的观点相反(Rossi和Rossi, 1990)，关于跨国家庭的新兴文献强调，这种紧密的亲属关系即使跨越国界也继续存在(Baldassar et al.， 2007)。利用2011年全国调查“移民对留在罗马尼亚的年长父母的影响”的最新数据，本文研究了涉及成年子女作为跨国移民及其留在家中的年长父母的代际团结的复杂动态。所使用的统计模型表明了移民作为汇款提供者的角色，但也表明了其他形式的支持在二人组之间分配的方式。尽管有一种可能的假设是，被留在家里的父母可能只是支持的受益者，但数据显示的情况恰恰相反:老年人，取决于他们的年龄，也是积极提供帮助的人。
{"title":"Elderly Parents, Adult Children and the Romanian Transnational Family: An Intergenerational Solidarity Approach","authors":"Ionuț Földes","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2016-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2016-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Recent demographic changes such as ageing, low-fertility, and large out-migration from Eastern European countries, brought into discussion the vivid question of the future of intergenerational solidarity within families. In the context of increasing geographical mobility of young people in search for better paid jobs, the unmet need for personal assistance among the elderly, the underdeveloped system of care services, Romania knows new dynamics of intergenerational support. Contrary to perspectives that consider spatial proximity between adult children and their elder parents the indisputable enabling factor for intergenerational support transfers (Rossi and Rossi, 1990), emerging literature on transnational families highlights that such tight kinship relations continue to exist even across borders (Baldassar et al., 2007). Using recent data from the nationwide survey “The Impact of Migration on Older Parents Left Behind in Romania” (2011), this paper examines the complex dynamics of intergenerational solidarity involving adult children as transnational migrants and their elder parents who remain at home. The statistical models used indicate the migrants’ role as providers of remittances, but also the ways in which other forms of support are distributed among the dyads. Despite a possible presupposition that parents who were left at home might only be beneficiaries of support, the data show the opposite: elderly persons, depending on their age, were active providers of help as well.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/subbs-2016-0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67316132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The present paper challenges the dominance of the digital natives’ agenda and turns its attention to the social context in which Internet usage among adolescents occurs. Findings indicate that even when young people are using the Internet with the same frequency, i.e. every day, the differences among them remain significant. Therefore, it can be argued that considering an entire cohort to be similar in terms of Internet use only due its age is a misconception. The way children make use of the Internet and the gratifications they gain after using it depend, as van Dijk (2005) showed, on the quality of access, on the level of skills, and on the personal (e.g. Experience, self-efficacy, confidence) and positional resources (e.g. Age, gender, socio-economic status). Questioning the main determinants that lead to the most advanced way to make use of the Internet, the logistic analysis shows that, in order for a Romanian adolescent to turn into an experienced user once he or she embedded the Internet in his or her everyday life, is a matter of skills, experience, and time online, and is less a matter of socioeconomic background. However, we have to keep in mind the previous path analysis’ findings, which emphasize that online experience, time spent online, self-efficacy, and digital skills are all determined, through direct or indirect effects, by demographic variables (i.e. age, gender and socio-economic status), even when age is held constant (Fizesan [Balea], 2012).
{"title":"Digital Natives or Not? How do Romanian Adolescents Cross the Boundaries of Internet Common Use","authors":"Bianca Balea","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2016-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2016-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The present paper challenges the dominance of the digital natives’ agenda and turns its attention to the social context in which Internet usage among adolescents occurs. Findings indicate that even when young people are using the Internet with the same frequency, i.e. every day, the differences among them remain significant. Therefore, it can be argued that considering an entire cohort to be similar in terms of Internet use only due its age is a misconception. The way children make use of the Internet and the gratifications they gain after using it depend, as van Dijk (2005) showed, on the quality of access, on the level of skills, and on the personal (e.g. Experience, self-efficacy, confidence) and positional resources (e.g. Age, gender, socio-economic status). Questioning the main determinants that lead to the most advanced way to make use of the Internet, the logistic analysis shows that, in order for a Romanian adolescent to turn into an experienced user once he or she embedded the Internet in his or her everyday life, is a matter of skills, experience, and time online, and is less a matter of socioeconomic background. However, we have to keep in mind the previous path analysis’ findings, which emphasize that online experience, time spent online, self-efficacy, and digital skills are all determined, through direct or indirect effects, by demographic variables (i.e. age, gender and socio-economic status), even when age is held constant (Fizesan [Balea], 2012).","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67316320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Drawing on ethnographic and anthropological research on the Romanian communities in Eastern Serbia, this article seeks to contribute to the global scholarship on diaspora and migration. It reveals interesting differences between the well defined and intensely studied notion of “diaspora” on the one hand, and the understudied, but useful concept of “near diaspora” on the other. First, the presence of Romanians in Eastern Serbia is looked at from a gender perspective, in the wider context of feminization of international migration. Second, the paper argues that the Romanian women in Eastern Serbia adopt the strategy of living in the “social fog”, thus becoming what can be termed “foggy diaspora”.
{"title":"Foggy Diaspora: Romanian Women in Eastern Serbia","authors":"Annemarie Sorescu-Marinković","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2016-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2016-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Drawing on ethnographic and anthropological research on the Romanian communities in Eastern Serbia, this article seeks to contribute to the global scholarship on diaspora and migration. It reveals interesting differences between the well defined and intensely studied notion of “diaspora” on the one hand, and the understudied, but useful concept of “near diaspora” on the other. First, the presence of Romanians in Eastern Serbia is looked at from a gender perspective, in the wider context of feminization of international migration. Second, the paper argues that the Romanian women in Eastern Serbia adopt the strategy of living in the “social fog”, thus becoming what can be termed “foggy diaspora”.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/subbs-2016-0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67315671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Dependency and Development. The Political Economy of Romanian Capitalism","authors":"N. Petrovici","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2015-0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/subbs-2015-0012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67315589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Even if concepts of marriage and motherhood are subject to continuous changes and reinterpretations, women and men still marry and have children following more traditional or more unconventional patterns. My major interest in this research was to unveil Romanian middle-class women’s narratives regarding their perceptions over their own bodies and identities, by focusing my analysis on lived experiences, intimate scenes, daily practices and activities within marriage and motherhood. Qualitative empirical work was conducted in 2012 and 2015 in a post-socialist suburban neighbourhood, known as a place mostly inhabited by young, middle-class families. The analysis unfolds women’s class affinities and dispositions, their perception of the marital experience, identity and corporeal transformations, and their reflections on maternity as a transformative stage in terms of subjectivity, agency and body.
{"title":"Reflected Bodies: Women’s Perspectives on the Marital Experience and the Transformation of the Maternal Body. A Case Study of Middle-Class Women in Suburban Romania","authors":"Silvia Butean","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2015-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Even if concepts of marriage and motherhood are subject to continuous changes and reinterpretations, women and men still marry and have children following more traditional or more unconventional patterns. My major interest in this research was to unveil Romanian middle-class women’s narratives regarding their perceptions over their own bodies and identities, by focusing my analysis on lived experiences, intimate scenes, daily practices and activities within marriage and motherhood. Qualitative empirical work was conducted in 2012 and 2015 in a post-socialist suburban neighbourhood, known as a place mostly inhabited by young, middle-class families. The analysis unfolds women’s class affinities and dispositions, their perception of the marital experience, identity and corporeal transformations, and their reflections on maternity as a transformative stage in terms of subjectivity, agency and body.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/subbs-2015-0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67315676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract According to official data, Romanian voter turnout decreased by half for the period 1990-2012. Gaps between official and self-reported turnout are larger than those from similar countries. Starting with these findings, this paper questions the official data regarding turnout and brings evidence that turnout in Romanian elections is increasingly underestimated. Three factors are responsible for this: the quality of the electoral registers, ineligible voters and emigration. The effect of these factors grew over time inducing the idea that turnout is sharply decreasing. In fact, the decrease is less pronounced, and most of it took place between 1990 and 2000. In the last part, I discuss the implications of the findings in three domains: theoretical debates, methodological and practical issues.
{"title":"Turnout Decline in Romanian National Elections: Is it that Big?","authors":"Mircea Comșa","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2015-0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract According to official data, Romanian voter turnout decreased by half for the period 1990-2012. Gaps between official and self-reported turnout are larger than those from similar countries. Starting with these findings, this paper questions the official data regarding turnout and brings evidence that turnout in Romanian elections is increasingly underestimated. Three factors are responsible for this: the quality of the electoral registers, ineligible voters and emigration. The effect of these factors grew over time inducing the idea that turnout is sharply decreasing. In fact, the decrease is less pronounced, and most of it took place between 1990 and 2000. In the last part, I discuss the implications of the findings in three domains: theoretical debates, methodological and practical issues.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/subbs-2015-0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67315896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This study analyses the practice of medical pluralism in contemporary Romania, addressing the phenomenon of alternative medicine through the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct. Employing in-depth interviews with general and alternative practitioners from two towns in Transylvania, and participant observations in spaces where they practice their knowledge, I describe how certain discursive acts reformulate the body and the subject-patient. Alternative therapists construct their practice in direct opposition to several parameters of biomedicine, such as the logic of diagnosis, treatment, and the praxis of patient’s visit to the general practitioner’s office, discussed in the paper. They define their approach as psychosomatic, and set-up the medical space as a confessional space, envisioning a holistic corporeality and the idea of the “inner doctor” in each patient. This conduct would supposedly make the subject “active” and “empowered”, as opposed to the “passive” patient succumbed to the diagnosis of conventional doctors.
{"title":"Alternative Medicine as Counter-Conduct: Therapeutic Spaces and Medical Rationality in Contemporary Romania","authors":"Corina Rusu","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2015-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study analyses the practice of medical pluralism in contemporary Romania, addressing the phenomenon of alternative medicine through the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct. Employing in-depth interviews with general and alternative practitioners from two towns in Transylvania, and participant observations in spaces where they practice their knowledge, I describe how certain discursive acts reformulate the body and the subject-patient. Alternative therapists construct their practice in direct opposition to several parameters of biomedicine, such as the logic of diagnosis, treatment, and the praxis of patient’s visit to the general practitioner’s office, discussed in the paper. They define their approach as psychosomatic, and set-up the medical space as a confessional space, envisioning a holistic corporeality and the idea of the “inner doctor” in each patient. This conduct would supposedly make the subject “active” and “empowered”, as opposed to the “passive” patient succumbed to the diagnosis of conventional doctors.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67315559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In this paper I examine the consequences of the 1989 political overturn in Romania on the selfhood. To this purpose, I initiate a twofold analysis: the official discourse of both socio-political systems, socialism and liberalism, and the individual’s quotidian discourse. The first one will enable a comparative view, over the ’bottom-up’ constructed realities, and the second will account for the degree of pervasiveness and naturalization of ideological views and, in this way, of a “top-down” identity construction and its configurations. One of the most apprehensible provisions through which liberalism endeavoured to institutionalize its own way of setting out reality is land restitution. Thereafter, I will discuss the way re-appropriation was experienced and its various subjectivization trajectories, but also the wider frame of the postsocialist economic transformations: rethinking work, money, the state and the interrelations between them. This particular angle of sight will disclose the mechanisms through which liberalism has deconstructed the system of socialist meaning and representation, at the same time replacing it with a socio-political order which reconfigured these meanings.
{"title":"Postsocialism or when ‘Having’ is another Way of ‘Being’. The Reconfiguring of Identity through Land Restitution and the Narratives of the Past","authors":"E. Chiorean","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2015-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper I examine the consequences of the 1989 political overturn in Romania on the selfhood. To this purpose, I initiate a twofold analysis: the official discourse of both socio-political systems, socialism and liberalism, and the individual’s quotidian discourse. The first one will enable a comparative view, over the ’bottom-up’ constructed realities, and the second will account for the degree of pervasiveness and naturalization of ideological views and, in this way, of a “top-down” identity construction and its configurations. One of the most apprehensible provisions through which liberalism endeavoured to institutionalize its own way of setting out reality is land restitution. Thereafter, I will discuss the way re-appropriation was experienced and its various subjectivization trajectories, but also the wider frame of the postsocialist economic transformations: rethinking work, money, the state and the interrelations between them. This particular angle of sight will disclose the mechanisms through which liberalism has deconstructed the system of socialist meaning and representation, at the same time replacing it with a socio-political order which reconfigured these meanings.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/subbs-2015-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67315766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on consequences of uneven development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties located in the historical region of Transylvania. It presents the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators, the construction of composite indexes and the profiles of localities according to their values. We explore the statistical correlations between our indexes and the poverty rates measured for 2002 (CASPIS, 2004), as well as the Local Human Development Index proposed by Sandu (2011) and revised by the World Bank (2014). Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements, but to measure the extent of material deprivation at the level of the entire administrative unit. In this way, we refrained from seeing poverty as the problem of a socially (and sometimes spatially) marginalized settlement, and instead defined poverty as a problem of the entire local community, that should be addressed by the local community as a whole. Our data reveals that, after controlling for poverty and local resources, the share of the Roma ethnic minority is a strong statistical predictor of registered unemployment, however, it does not correlate with the frequency of granting social assistance benefits.
{"title":"Mapping Deprivation in Rural Areas from Transylvania: Reflections on a Methodological Exercise","authors":"C. Raț, Andrada Tobias, Valér Veres","doi":"10.1515/subbs-2015-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on consequences of uneven development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties located in the historical region of Transylvania. It presents the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators, the construction of composite indexes and the profiles of localities according to their values. We explore the statistical correlations between our indexes and the poverty rates measured for 2002 (CASPIS, 2004), as well as the Local Human Development Index proposed by Sandu (2011) and revised by the World Bank (2014). Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements, but to measure the extent of material deprivation at the level of the entire administrative unit. In this way, we refrained from seeing poverty as the problem of a socially (and sometimes spatially) marginalized settlement, and instead defined poverty as a problem of the entire local community, that should be addressed by the local community as a whole. Our data reveals that, after controlling for poverty and local resources, the share of the Roma ethnic minority is a strong statistical predictor of registered unemployment, however, it does not correlate with the frequency of granting social assistance benefits.","PeriodicalId":53506,"journal":{"name":"Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/subbs-2015-0011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67315509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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