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Abstract
The following contribution aims to shed light upon some facts that can be relevant to the academic field as well as to the practical social/political life, facts related to whether the Romanian Social Democratic Party (Partidul Social Democrat, PSD) properly belongs to the left wing political spectrum in Europe (more precisely to the ideological family of socialists and social-democrats) and also regarding its continuity with the traditional Romanian (interwar period and pre-1918) left. I will review the main theoretical approaches concerning the role and the functions of ideology for political parties and, as a case study, I will analyze the party's pol itical programs and electoral manifestos for the 2016 legislative elections.
Keywords: ideology, social-democracy, political party, political program, electoral manifesto.
Introduction
This article aims to realize a research whose main object is the Social Democratic Party in Romania (PSD), currently the main parliamentary and governing party12 (since December 2016 - January 2017), as well as the main national political actor, also taking into account the votes and mandates obtained at the local elections in June, 2016. The main aspects which will be analyzed will be the party ideology, starting with the official documents of the party (political programs and electoral materials/manifestos) used in the electoral campaign of November-December 2016, whose validity was repeatedly reasserted by PSD and its leading staff up to the present. These will be compared mainly with the typical positioning on similar themes of European parties with the same ideological orientation, and colleagues of the PSD in transnational party organizations. Also, in order to properly define de context, I will present aspects linked to the historical evolution of socialism and social-democracy, I will try to synthesize the historical context of the main values and ideological benchmarks of the evolution of the socialist and social-democratic left at an international and European level, including also the main theoretical and methodological approaches regarding the research and measurement of the ideological position of political parties.
After Romania's accession to the European Council (1993) and especially to the European Union (2007), but mainly after PSD's admission to the Socialist International (2003) and later to the Party of European Socialists (2005), the affiliation movement following a similar trend with the majority of "classical" left parties...