Dual Politicization and Regime Adaptation: Populist Discourse Between Protest and Parliament in Romania.

This paper examines how post-communist regimes adapt to diversified forms of political participation by managing the relationship between informal contention and institutional politics. Focusing on Romania and Moldova between 2020 and 2025, the study analyzes the circulation of populist and oppositional discourse across two arenas of participation: protest-related media coverage and parliamentary debate. This study combines two complementary corpora to examine the temporal and thematic dynamics of politicization across civic and institutional arenas in Romania: (1) media reports on protests, and (2) transcripts of parliamentary debates. The former is analyzed through a protest event analysis (PEA) of approximately 7,000 newspaper articles from eight Romanian regions and 3,000 from three Moldovan regions, processed through the PAPEA pipeline (Haunss et al., 2025). The latter, includes the complete set of plenary debate transcripts from the Romanian Parliament for the period of analysis. The findings indicate a pattern of dual politicization: while informal participation through protest remains episodic, reactive, and event-driven, institutional actors reproduce conflictual and populist discourses in a continuous and routinized manner. Rather than translating episodic and informal participation into enhanced democratic responsiveness, the regime adapts by symbolically absorbing contention at the discursive level. Conflict is reproduced within parliamentary discourse without establishing durable channels of influence between civic mobilization and institutional decision-making. As a result, participation expands, but political responsiveness remains limited, reflecting a form of discursive regime adaptation rather than democratic deepening. By linking contentious politics, populist discourse, and regime responses, the paper contributes to debates on how hybrid democracies manage new forms of participation without necessarily enhancing democratic resilience in the post-pandemic era.