Examining Public Policy in Romania: Is It Transparent and Legitimated?

Abstract

In the last decades, in the context of many economic and financial crisis, the policy-making became the heart of government. In Romania, they represents the main instruments for solving the citizens’ problem: health care, education, the environment, and the mechanisms by which public money is budgeted. Therefore, this paper analyses the transparency and consultation in policy-making process from the view of different policy-making stages. The paper discusses the different mechanism and procedure designed and applied by Romanian government in policy-making process. Finally, it describes possible links between policy-making capacity and indicators for transparency, starting from Joseph Stiglitz assertion on the adverse effects of secrecy in government policy-making, “with more mistakes, public officials become more defensive; to protect themselves, they seek even more secrecy, narrowing in the circle still further, eroding still further the quality of decision-making”.