Date of Award

8-23-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

Advisor(s)

Seth Jolly

Subject Categories

Political Science | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

Abstract In the European Union generally, and Eastern Europe more specifically, several countries have recently become significantly less democratic. In this dissertation, I analyze the relationship between the EU and democratic backsliding. Namely, I explore the EU’s inconsistent, and sometimes absent response to member state democratic backsliding. Even after ten new member states joined the EU in 2004, the number of infringement procedures, the formal requests from the European Commission to member states for compliance, decreased dramatically. We might expect infringements to increase as democratic erosion creeps up, especially after the addition of ten new member states. What can explain this apparent lack of response from the EU Commission (the institution responsible for monitoring and enforcing EU law)? With a two-stage argument, I show that both structural and strategic factors help explain why the EU Commission responds to some democratic backsliding in member states, but not all. On the one hand, enforcement decisions are structured by institutional context; on the other, they are not entirely constrained by them. The structural factors examined here include the legal mandate to monitor and enforce EU law, as well as the resources and tools necessary to do so. After showing that the EU Commission has been legally designated to enforce EU law, and has also been given mechanisms to accomplish this task, I then examine an important, but often overlooked, institutional resource: time. Using structural topic models, I develop a novel measure of institutional time, and show that when the EU is facing crises, enforcement of EU law declines. However, the effects of crises on enforcement are not inevitable. I also show that strategic concerns matter too–when EU citizens are Eurosceptic, the Commission is less likely to start an infringement. When the Commission gets more written letters from the parliament, there are more infringements. In the second stage, I use case studies from the Czech Republic and Hungary to determine whether the general quantitative correlations using all infringements holds for democratic backsliding infringements in particular. The findings here are mixed. Additionally, the case studies suggest an alternative explanation for Commission response: concerns about the EU’s image vis-´a-via treaty agreements with other institutions like the WTO. This possible causal link warrants further study. This project has important implications for democracy’s future. On the macro-level, democratic backsliding threatens the stability of the EU as a whole, potentially undermining the entire integration project. On the micro-level, erosion has concrete negative effects on EU citizens, especially those from marginalized communities, as authoritarian leaders capture democratic institutions like the media, civil society, even electoral and judicial systems, making it harder for citizens to participate politically. As challenging as these issues are, this project also illuminates pathways for democratic resilience. While international institutions “matter” when it comes to democratic erosion, they are not deterministic. The political choices made by EU citizens and the European Parliament have the potential to alter undemocratic institutional trajectories.

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Open Access

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