Tina Margarete Freyburg

The European Union (EU) is said to be tired of enlargement – but how likely is it that a candidate would be ready to join within 10, 15 or more years? This research forecasts how prospective members are likely able to perform in implementing EU law until 2050. Using compliance data of all states from the 2004, 2007 and 2013 accession rounds, as well as of five current/potential candidates, we construct an empirical model on candidates’ ability to comply with the acquis communautaire. We employ in-sample and out-of-sample techniques to ensure high model prediction accuracy and, ultimately, forecast the five candidates’ potential compliance levels in 2017–2050. Our research shows that only one candidate might sufficiently be able to comply with the accession criteria until 2023, while many are unlikely to be ready before the mid-2030s. Focusing on prediction and forecasting, our contribution is given by the research’s policy relevance and its methodological innovation.

Existing research seems to agree that European Union (EU) accession conditionality facilitated processes of political and economic transformation for the recent enlargement rounds. However, despite its importance, systematic research beyond small-N qualitative studies that produces generalizable insights is scarce. Most strikingly, it remains unclear at which stage of the enlargement process and to what extent candidate countries complied with EU law in the context of accession conditionality. Building upon previous theoretical accounts, the authors argue that candidates’ compliance behaviour can be examined more thoroughly when focusing on the credibility of EU conditionality at different phases over the process of accession negotiations, which are characterized by varying degrees of membership probability. The article’s main contribution stems from the empirical analysis, which employs generalized additive models on new data of candidate countries’ compliance with EU law under accession conditionality from 1998 to 2009.

Is functional cooperation with authoritarian regimes a blessing or a curse for democratization? Scholars predominantly view cooperation with authoritarian regimes as counterproductive in terms of democratization because it helps the incumbent government to remain in power by stabilizing the regime. This article presents evidence to suggest that functional cooperation can also be considered a promising way of yielding subtle processes of democratization that have hitherto been overlooked. It explores to what extent state officials become acquainted with democratic governance by participating in transgovernmental policy networks, notably the Twinning Program, set up by the European Union in order to implement functional cooperation with its Southern neighborhood. The study conducts regression analyses based on original survey data on Moroccan state officials’ attitudes toward democratic governance and complements these analyses with a qualitative comparison of different networks. The findings corroborate an optimistic reading of functional cooperation. By significantly shaping the attitudes toward democratic governance of involved state officials, cooperation appears to be able to plant seeds of change inside authoritarian regimes.