The Leverage of International Institutions on Democratizing States: Eastern Europe and the European Union

democratization; EU-East-Central Europe; Europeanization; globalization; NATO

Who opposes the EU? continuity and change in party Euroscepticism between 2014 and 2019

A new round of data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, covering 2019, is due to be released. The survey, which estimates the positions of political parties on a variety of ideological and policy issues, offers an invaluable tool for assessing political competition in Europe. Ryan Bakker, Liesbet Hooghe, Seth Jolly, Gary Marks, Jonathan Polk, Jan Rovny, Marco Steenbergen, and Milada Anna Vachudova draw on the latest data to examine where European political parties now stand on European integration, and how their positions have changed since the last full survey was conducted in 2014

Reliability and Validity of the 2002 and 2006 Chapel Hill Expert Surveys on Party Positioning

This research note reports on the 2002 and 2006 Chapel Hill expert surveys (CHES), which measure national party positioning on European integration, ideology, and several European Union (EU) and non-EU policies. The reliability of expert judgments is examined and the CHES data are cross-validated with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project, the 2003 Benoit-Laver expert survey and the 2002 Rohrschneider-Whitefield survey. The dataset is available on the CHES website

Bargaining among Unequals: Enlargement and the Future of European Integration

[Abstract by Archive of European Integration editor]. Focusing on "asymmetric interdependence" - those who benefit most must sacrifice most - this essay ponders the consequences of accession for the new states

National Interests, State Power, and EU Enlargement. CES Working Paper, no. 97, 2003

The EU enlargement process and its consequences are decisively influenced by material national interests and state power. Current EU leaders promote accession primarily because they believe it to be in their longterm economic and geopolitical interest, and applicant states embark on the laborious accession process because EU membership brings tremendous economic and geopolitical benefits, particularly as compared exclusion as others move forward. As in previous rounds of EU enlargement, patterns of asymmetrical interdependence dictate that the applicants compromise more on the margin—thereby contributing to a subjective sense of loss among those countries (the applicants) that benefit most. Domestic distributional conflict is exacerbated everywhere, but the losses are in most cases limited, inevitable and, in the longer term, even beneficial. Once in, we should expect applicant states, like their predecessors, to deploy their voting and veto power in an effort to transfer resources to themselves. While overrepresentation of smaller states gives the applicants an impressive number of votes, the lack of new “grand projects” essential to existing members, the diversity of the new members, and above all, the increasingly flexible decision-making structure of the EU, will make it difficult for the new members to prevail

Democratization in Postcommunist Europe: Illiberal Regimes and the Leverage of International Actors. CES Working Paper, no. 139, 2006

The European Union (EU) may be presiding over the most successful democracy promotion program ever implemented by an international actor. Among postcommunist states with a credible EU membership perspective, we can see a significant – though far from complete – convergence toward liberal democracy. This is all the more interesting since ten years ago many of these states had illiberal or authoritarian regimes. I focus in this article on the sources of political change in previously illiberal regimes before and after “watershed elections,” especially in the Western Balkans. I argue that over time the EU’s leverage strengthened the hand of liberal forces against illiberal ones by way of four mechanisms: creating a focal point for cooperation, providing incentives for adapting, using conditionality, and serving as a credible commitment for reform. Consequently, most political parties have eventually changed their agenda to make it compatible with the state’s bid for EU membership. I investigate the domestic conditions that have caused these mechanisms to function only weakly in Serbia and Bosnia

The Leverage of International Institutions on Democratizing States: Eastern Europe and the European Union

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020