Anchoring Democracy from Above? The European Union and Democratic Backsliding in Hungary and Romania after Accession

2013/12/10 by Ulrich Sedelmeier · 6 citations
Social Sciences · #European Union Policy and Governance #European and International Law Studies #Social Policy and Reform Studies

paper · doi:10.1111/jcms.12082

Abstract

Abstract This article analyzes the E uropean U nion's reactions to breaches of liberal democratic practices in H ungary and R omania during 2012–13 in order to assess its capacity to lock in democracy in the M ember S tates. The article finds that a combination of partisan politics and weak normative consensus thwarted the EU 's ability to use the sanctioning mechanism of Article 7. The effectiveness of alternative instruments that EU institutions used – social pressure, infringement procedures and issue linkage – varied across issues and countries. In H ungary, changes to illiberal practices generally remained limited, but differences in the EU 's material leverage explain cross‐issue variation. The EU 's relative success in Romania suggests that it is not necessarily powerless against democratic backsliding. It might require a demanding constellation of favourable conditions for both social and material pressure, but there are grounds for a more optimistic interpretation that material leverage might be unnecessary if the conditions for social pressure are favourable.

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• EU Leverage and National Interests in the Balkans: The Puzzles of Enlargement Ten Years On
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• Getting Central and Eastern Europe Right? How Greater Academic Pluralism Would Improve Collective Knowledge-Building in Democratization Studies
• Sanctioning democratic backsliding in the European Union: transnational salience, negative intergovernmental spillover, and policy change
• Political safeguards against democratic backsliding in the EU: the limits of material sanctions and the scope of social pressure
• The ideational foundations of the illiberal backlash in Central and Eastern Europe: the case of Hungary
• Antidote to Backsliding: Ethnic Politics and Democratic Resilience

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