Same Menu, Different Recipes? Democratic Backsliding and the Limits of EU Political Conditionality

Revisiting the assumptions about the effectiveness of democratic conditionality, this paper critically examines the impact of the EU’s enlargement policy on key indicators of democratic quality in Central and Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. It postulates that the declining leverage of the EU in both regions has enabled the emergence of backsliding in the form of executive aggrandizement and the systematic undermining of domestic democratic safeguards. Using time-series cross-sectional analysis on the basis of the V-Dem dataset, I show that while the prospect of EU membership yielded improvements during the pre-accession phase in both regions, democratic performance has become much more uneven in recent years. Negative trends go beyond the mere slowdown or stagnation of democracy levels, extending to outright democratic backsliding. In the case of new member states, this occurs only during the post-accession phase, whereas the Western Balkans cases shows signs of deteriorating democratic performance already during the candidacy period. The paper’s findings feed into the debate on the limits of EU conditionality and inform discussions about democratisation patterns and democratic deconsolidation in Eastern Europe.