The quality of democracy perceived by the population of Romania in march 2023

Abstract

This paper aims to assess the degree of democratization perceived by the population of Romania with the intention of consolidating the current democracy. A total of 1013 people from Romania responded to the questions Q of a common European questionnaire in March 2023. We list some of the aspects addressed: knowledge of some essential features of democracy regarding the expression of opinions, ways of conducting debates, appreciation of the quality of information; citizens' satisfaction with the existing democracy in Romania; serious threats to democracy in Romania; characteristics in the conduct of free and fair elections as well as important aspects regarding the electoral campaign; perception of actions of disinformation of citizens; a hierarchy of media types according to the disinformation or fake news operations carried out; ways to effectively manage online platforms in order to reduce disinformation and information manipulation; analyzing the quality of information received from online platforms; the population's perception of the efficiency for entities dedicated to defending democracy. The X variables that define nuanced responses of the interviewed persons are, as a rule, of the ordinal categorical type. In such a situation, we proposed the TREND(X) indicator with the intention of evaluating the intensity of the positive trend for the variable X.