Democrats on the Streets. Drivers of Student Protest Participation in Romania

Since 2011, protests in post-communist Romania have changed their goals. Protesters claim to guard fundamental values of democracy such as the rule of law and fair representation and to rise against institutions crippled by corruption. In similar fashion to the 1989 revolution and the early 1990s protests, students have assumed an active role in these events. They took to the streets in Bucharest, Cluj, Iași and Timișoara, the country's four largest cities, and elsewhere. Over the same period, social media has proven essential for the gathering of information, for coordinating collective action and expressing the young protesters' identity. Yet recent research (Badescu and Sum 2018) canvasses a gloomy picture of Romanian youth, said to have an eroded democratic profile. This situation is not unique. In Hungary, age and the display of authoritarian attitudes are inversely related, unlike in Poland (Fesnic 2015). Eastern Europeans might have finally rejected the remnants of the previous regime, yet the new generation is eager to embrace values that are not necessarily democratic. Value change trends bring out new interpretations to the way the transition to democracy unfolds in Eastern Europe. This paper addresses this contrast by discovering the combination of attitudes that drives youth to protest. With the help of a student survey conducted in 2017, it is shown that protest engagement is positively linked to the pro-democratic and diversity-embracing attitudes of students.

2011年以来，后共产主义时期罗马尼亚的抗议活动目标已发生转变。抗议者宣称要捍卫法治、公平代表权等民主核心价值，并反对因腐败而瘫痪的机构。与1989年革命及20世纪90年代初的抗议活动类似，学生在这些事件中扮演了积极角色——他们走上布加勒斯特、克卢日、雅西和蒂米什瓦拉这四个罗马尼亚最大城市及其他地区的街头。同一时期，社交媒体被证明在信息收集、协调集体行动及表达年轻抗议者身份认同方面至关重要。然而，近期研究（Badescu and Sum 2018）描绘了罗马尼亚青年的黯淡图景，称其民主形象已被侵蚀。这种情况并非个例：在匈牙利，年龄与威权主义态度的表现呈负相关，而波兰则相反（Fesnic 2015）。东欧人或许最终摒弃了前政权的残余，但新一代却渴望接纳未必民主的价值观。价值观变迁趋势为东欧民主转型的演进方式带来了新的解读。本文通过探究驱动青年参与抗议的态度组合，旨在解决这一矛盾；2017年开展的学生调查结果显示，抗议参与度与学生的亲民主及包容多元的态度呈正相关。