Romanian city halls have Facebook pages now. Nearly all of them. The question researchers at Ovidius University set out to answer is whether that has made any difference to how open those city halls actually are — and their answer is more awkward than either side of the argument expects.

Mari-Isabella Stan and Tănase Tasențe studied information, consultation and communication in Romanian local public administration online, comparing Constanța and Cluj-Napoca. Their paper appeared in 2023 in Revista de Comunicación de la SEECI.

What they found

Social media use did improve transparency. But the gain was strongest at moderate levels of use, and it flattened out after roughly 40 to 50 per cent usage. Past that point, posting more stopped helping.

The reason is not that citizens stop caring. It is that volume and quality are different things. An administration that publishes constantly but does not answer, does not explain and does not change anything in response is more visible without being more accountable. The study's conclusion is that what gets published matters more than how often — a finding that lines up with the wider literature on digital governance, and one that is inconvenient for anyone measuring a communications department by post count.

What the law already requires

None of this happens in a vacuum. Two Romanian laws set the floor:

  • Law 52/2003, on decisional transparency, obliges central and local authorities to publish draft normative acts before adopting them, to take recommendations from citizens and from legally constituted associations, and to publish an annual report on how they did it — including how many recommendations arrived and how many were accepted.
  • Law 544/2001, on free access to information of public interest, governs what has to be handed over on request, including the record of public meetings.

A Facebook page is not a substitute for either. It is a channel, and the interesting question about any channel is what travels back along it.

Why this pair of cities

Constanța and Cluj-Napoca are a useful comparison because they are similar in the ways that usually explain differences away — both are large Romanian county seats with universities, ports or airports, and administrations under real pressure from growth — and different in how they have chosen to talk to residents. Comparing two cities of that size isolates the communication practice from the size of the city.

What it means for a city hall

The practical reading of the paper is narrow and worth stating plainly. Past a certain point, a city's next unit of effort is better spent on the substance of what it publishes than on publishing more of it: explaining a decision that has already been taken, answering the question under the post, and showing what changed because somebody asked.

That is also the harder thing to do, which is presumably why the curve flattens.

Source: Mari-Isabella Stan and Tănase Tasențe, “Examining information, consultation, and communication in Romanian local public administrations within the online sphere: A case study of Constanța and Cluj-Napoca”, Revista de Comunicación de la SEECI, vol. 56 (2023), pp. 357–376. Legal framework: Legea nr. 52/2003 privind transparența decizională în administrația publică and Legea nr. 544/2001 privind liberul acces la informațiile de interes public. Rewritten and re-sourced in September 2026; the 2024 version of this page carried section headings with no findings under them and credited a cost-of-living database that had no part in the research.