Government Instability Indicators and the Exercise of Limited "Consensus" in Post-Communist Romania (1992-2004) (Contemporary Romania: Action and Reflection) (Report‪)‬

During the 1990s post-communist societies faced similar challenges at the level of executive government. Since the early studies of Rosenthal (1978), political science literature's focus is on the different continuums of political stability. The literature argued that "political stability, political order and political structure belong to a single category of political concepts. One may call it the category of time oriented political concepts. Political stability indicates that a political phenolmenon (unit of analysis) has stood unaltered throughout a period of time" (1) (italics added). From an empirical standpoint, Jose Casanova argued "the greatest threats to political stability are likely to result from excessive democratization, that is, from internal cleavages, hyper-mobilization, the overload of social and political demands, and the ensuing crisis of governability of paralysis of centralized, unified command" (2) (italics added).