Public data:
Romanian mayors

This dataset provides records of party affiliations of Romanian mayors in the 2012-2016 term.

According to Romanian law, migration of elected officials from a party to another, after election, is not possible.

However, in 2014 the government (lead by the Social Democratic Party) issued an emergency ordinance, to allow a short exception period when mayors, local and county councilors where able to change their party affiliation. The changed the political map sat up by the 2012 local elections. ExpertForum, an NGO, report 3.180 such changes for mayors in the 45-days window. The same NGO produced a map to show the movement of mayors from a party to another.

We have used that map to build up a database including the corrected initial affiliation of the mayor (according to the results published in 2012 by the Central Electoral Office), and the final destination as reported by ExpertForum.

The work was done mainly by Vlad Achimescu (free lancer), with inputs from Bogdan Voicu (Romanian Academy/Research Institute for Quality of Life) and Dragoș Radu (Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung).