« Activities « Conference Papers
27-29 January 2026
Silvia Marton, PI, presented the paper “Voting and Electoral Fraud in Nineteenth Century Romania. A Contribution to the History of Corruption” at the international conference “Electoral Fraud and Political Distrust: Entanglements and New Perspectives of Study in Modern Europe (c. 1750 – c. 1950),” organized at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona on 28-29 January 2026. Her paper discussed the role of trust and distrust in electoral politics during the pre-democratic period of limited suffrage in Romania. Specifically, she examined the techniques for directing and influencing the vote, and the social dimension of voting in the electoral colleges. The paper’s main questions were: Was trust a variable to understand the electoral process? Why did certain electors vote constantly for the same candidates and were loyal to a specific party/faction’s candidates, while others voted ‘the government’, whoever that was out of the two political groups, the Liberals or the Conservatives? How to understand the volatile voters’ behavior? Her paper showed that the numerous mechanisms of vote control and influence denoted lack of trust, mainly of the candidates in the voters.