Weak States, Weak Societies: Comparing New and Old Member States of the European Union

The transfer of rules, such as in the European Union's recent enlargements, requires well-functioning institutions of government as well as societal actors ready to engage with the new rules. Officials of the European Commission and other practitioners highlighted the need for both in the run-up to enlargement, while critics of the 2004 and 2007 rounds have faulted the state-centric approach employed by the EU for undercutting societal actors in the new member states. This paper examines data from the World Values Survey and World Bank Governance Indicators and shows that state capacity and organized interests do indeed go hand in hand: Among the 27 EU member states, countries that score high on good governance also have citizens engaged in interest organizations, volunteering for a broad variety of causes, and ready to participate in acts of protest. By the same token, in countries where governments struggle to deliver results, organized interests are insufficiently established and rarely in a position to perform governance functions. The data show systematic and statistically significant differences between old and new member states, with Eastern Europe lagging behind most of the older democracies on both dimensions, i.e. state capacity and civil society. Considerable variation within each block does not negate this basic gap. Rather than rely on nonstate actors to compensate for weak institutions of government, European policy makers need to invest in long-term efforts to strengthen state institutions and bring stakeholders into the processes of policy-making and implementatio

"Cross-National Policy Networks and the State"

This paper challenges overly optimistic claims about the power of nonstate actors in cross-border networks that link them with states and intergovernmental organizations. In a most-likely case design, the paper examines the social policy network between the European Union (EU) and Poland and Hungary prior to accession. The analysis focuses on two dimensions: whether states act as gatekeepers and whether national borders restrain communications. The paper demonstrates that while nonstate actors easily communicate with intergovernmental organizations such as the EU, contacts fail to cut across national borders. Network data show that the EU, as an intergovernmental actor, significantly controls the flow of communication, a fact that runs counter to the notion of networks as fluid entities that enable all actors to link freely with others. Both state and intergovernmental actors have an interest in network construction and control. Only by empirically tracking network contacts, the paper argues, will we be able to estimate the capacities and limits of nonstate actors in transnational politics

EU accession and party competition in post-communist Romania

This paper examines the impact of the EU on party competition in post-communist Romania by testing Robert Ladrech’s model for the Europeanization of Central and East European party systems. It argues that, although it certainly holds true for a variety of post-communist cases, Ladrech’s model has a very limited explanatory power in the Romanian case after accession, for two reasons. First, the post-accession period has seen further institutionalization of the party system through the gradual disappearance of the extreme-right from within the ranks of parliamentary parties, and through increased competition between established parties on the centre-left and the centre-right of the political spectrum. Second, there has been little change in parties’ stances on European integration. Thus, Romanian formations’ consensus on the benefits of EU membership has continued to exist in the period after accession, while conflicts over the EU’s socio-economic acquis, such as those emerging in Poland and the Czech Republic, have failed to materialize. The main explanation for this situation is the fact that Romania continues to be subject to monitoring in the form of the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism, which has essentially extended the EU’s conditionality into the post-accession period. Given continued monitoring by the European Commission, the distinction between the impact of the EU before and after accession is therefore less clear-cut in Romania’s case than in the case of other post-communist EU member states