The organization of Romanian parties abroad

Drawing on Panebianco (1988 ), the central assumption is that parties’ organizational characteristics depend on how these organizations originated and developed ( 1988 : 50). Our analysis is, therefore, focussed on the interplay between the contextual stimuli and the parties’ responses with regard to the development of local branches located outside the national state. In doing so, our focus will be on the case of Romania, which stands out as an interesting case for at least four reasons. To begin with, Romania is one of the most important migrant – sending countries in Europe ( Vintilă and Soare 2018 ). Second, the outfl ows from Romania have represented an important economic benefi t in the form of the infl ows of remittances, most of which originate from the EU (i.e., in particular Italy and Spain, Stănculescu and Stoiciu 2012 ). Romanian migrants’ remittances became a growing external source of capital for Romania, widely acknowledged and welcomed by national politicians. Third, the community of nonresidents has manifested increased interest with regard to the policymaking process in Romania. On several occasions, they mobilized in order to disrupt the implementation process of contested policies at home. Finally, although nonresident Romanians have been granted the right to vote in home country elections since the early days of post-communism, the topic of external voting has only become salient since the mid-2000s, when external votes started to have a pronounced impact on several benefit for the literature in general if we treat the Romanian case as a classic exploratory study with the aim of developing hypotheses and propositions for further inquiry electoral results. As such, we argue that this specifi c case study has a heuristic