SNSPA Digital Repository
Welcome to SNSPA Digital Repository, the institutional repository of the National University of Political Sciences and Public Administration.
The repository contains research produced by SNSPA academic staff, including journal articles, book chapters, books, working papers, conference papers, and more.
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Normative power and Europeanization: The EU’s global agenda for gender equality
(MDPI, 2026-07-27) Pirvulescu, Cristian; Ion, Oana-Andreea; Irod, Gabriela-Roxana
This article explores how the European Union (EU) promotes gender equality beyond its borders, situating the analysis within broader debates on external Europeanization and normative power. While most studies have examined the domestic impact of EU policies, this paper focuses on how gender equality norms are projected internationally and conceptually investigates the mechanisms involved in their diffusion. Drawing on existing theoretical literature, the article analyzes how EU-level normative strategies may interact with domestic political, institutional, and societal dynamics in third countries, often in complex and contested ways. Rather than providing empirical testing, the study identifies core mechanisms—such as strategic communication, partnerships, and funding tools—and reflects on their limitations and the role of local agency in interpreting or resisting EU-promoted norms. The findings highlight the difficulty of isolating EU influence from other international and transnational drivers of norm diffusion, and the need for caution in attributing policy shifts solely to EU action. The article concludes that a better understanding of these processes requires more attention to domestic contexts, as well as future empirical research to complement conceptual analyses of Europeanization in sensitive policy domains such as gender equality.
Urban–Rural Asymmetries in Social Resilience: The Role of Territorialized Institutional Trust in Central and Eastern Europe
(MDPI, 2026) Pirvulescu, Cristian
Social resilience has become a central concept in urban and sustainability research, yet its institutional and spatial determinants remain insufficiently specified in contexts marked by persistent urban–rural asymmetries. The objective of this article is to explain how spatial differences in institutional trust shape divergent resilience trajectories across territories in Central and Eastern Europe. This study develops a conceptual, mechanism-based framework and employs a qualitative comparative illustration based on institutional indicators of trust, service accessibility, and governance effectiveness. The analysis shows that territorialized institutional trust—structured by institutional presence, procedural consistency, and institutional legibility—systematically conditions access to resources, stabilizes expectations, and shapes adaptive behavior, with dense and predictable institutional environments supporting longer-term resilience while thin and uneven ones entrench short-term coping. The findings suggest that social resilience should be understood as an institutional outcome shaped by the spatial organization of governance rather than as a territorially neutral attribute of communities. The broader significance of the study lies in providing a territorially sensitive and institutionally grounded framework for urban sustainability and resilience planning, highlighting how built environment and governance arrangements jointly structure the adaptive capacities of urban and rural territories.
Institutional Resilience and Democratic Sustainability in Post-Transition Europe: Lessons from Romania and Central-Eastern Europe
(2026) Pirvulescu, Cristian
This paper conceptualizes institutional resilience as a core condition of democratic sustainability in post-transition Europe. Building on neo-institutionalist approaches and recent scholarship on democratic resilience, we argue that democracies endure when three capacities align: policy coherence, procedural legitimacy, and civic/monitory participation. Using a comparative, theory-guided design, we analyze Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia (2007–2025), triangulating V-Dem/Eurostat indicators with documentary evidence (EU Rule of Law reports, CEPEJ) and interpretive analysis. Romania illustrates “reactive resilience” anchored in judicial independence and civic vigilance; Slovakia shows “restorative resilience” after corruption scandals; Poland exhibits “societal compensatory resilience,” where civic mobilization offsets institutional regression; Hungary demonstrates “instrumental resilience without democracy,” combining administrative capacity with normative decay. We integrate these findings into a three-dimensional model—institutional, normative, and communicative—showing how feedback loops convert crisis into learning. The paper concludes that sustainable democracy depends less on constitutional design alone and more on the institutionalization of learning: redundant veto points, impartial procedures that generate trust, and a monitory public sphere that sustains continuous accountability. For EU policy, the shift from conditionality to capacity (e.g., RRF) can foster endogenous resilience when supranational norms are domestically internalized rather than externally imposed.
Populism without history: Central and Eastern Europe and the case for a historical turn in populism research
(2026-05) Craciun, Claudiu
This article examines the dominant modes of conceptualising populism and critically engages with the ahistorical tendencies that have come to characterise much of the recent research in this field. Despite the robust historical reasoning and conceptual tools developed within comparative politics, populism research has largely avoided engaging with them. The article proposes an alternative analytical framework. In order to situate conditions, institutions, actors, and events within a single framework and across time, it advances the concept of populist configurations. These encompass populist actors, strategies, discourses, and styles, but also incorporate structural factors and transformations, such as degrees of sovereignty and socio-economic orders, as well as elite cohesion and responses, and critical junctures: significant events that alter power relations and shape the trajectories of (populist) politics. The article explores Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a region with contested geographical and historical boundaries that nonetheless shares a distinctive set of structural features. Its belated development and chronic exposure to external aggression and domination, a consequence of the relatively small size of its historical polities, set the conditions for the region’s uneven and conflictual transition to modern politics. The region also endured two world wars and a turbulent succession of competing political regimes, such as constitutional monarchies, military and royal dictatorships, socialist and communist republics, and parliamentary democracies, a trajectory that sets it apart in global historical comparisons and poses significant challenges to any account of its long-term political dynamics. In this long-term dynamic, it can be argued that populisms are rooted in early-modern contention and not electoral politics, and this contention was defined by the sovereignty—social reform uneasy ambivalence. Drawing on the Romanian case, the article develops a typology, a timeline, and an illustrative case of populist configuration—antisemitism, both to demonstrate the advantages of this research strategy and to call for a systematic historical turn in the study of populism.
The Future of Higher Education, Readiness for the Open Innovation Paradigm
(2025-10-09) Grigorescu, Adriana; Pirciog, Speranta; Mochnacs, Amalia-Elena; Sigurjonsson, Throstur Olaf
The open innovation (OI) paradigm has significantly impacted higher education, especially within the context of the global networks of societies. The COVID-19 pandemic spurred innovation, creating online educational communities and transforming the academic approach. While OI, the movement towards online learning, and the industry-academia cooperation for a better grounding in labor market demands have been discussed in previous studies, this quantitative study furthers the understanding of the preparedness and efficiency of the education system for the new labor market. This study investigates the potential correlation between the education system and various socio-economic indicators, such as education expenditure, mobility opportunities, digital inclusion, employment, and urbanization. The regression analysis was conducted on the dataset obtained from the open-access EUROSTAT database.