1,720,985 research outputs found
CONDITIONING DEMOCRATIZATION: EU MEMBERSHIP CONDITIONALITY AND DOMESTIC POLITICS IN BALKAN INSTITUTIONAL REFORMS
Full text linkThe uneven effects of EU membership conditionality on Eastern European reforms continue to puzzle the research community. Sometimes, the research focus has been too large, considering EU membership conditionality as a policy implemented uniformly across policy areas. Other efforts take a too narrow approach by trying to explain the effects of EU membership conditionality in single sectors. I suggest studying this phenomenon through a set of mid-level theories in a cross-country, cross-sectorial approach. I argue that both the intensity of EU membership conditionality and reform outcomes are contingent upon the policy sector context; hence, we should take a sectorial contextual approach in studying them. Reform outcomes result from the interplay between EU’s and domestic leaders’ interests in a particular sectorial reform. I assume domestic leaders to be rational, power driven actors. I argue that, since they act in some weakly institutionalized political environments such as Eastern European societies, they represent the principal actors in the power game. I assume the EU to be a rational actor as well; yet, differently from Eastern Europe, the role of individual leaders is less distinguishable in the highly institutionalized EU political theatre. In this case, EU institutions are the primary political agents. They are interested in maintaining and enlarging the Union as a stable democracy. Expanding an earlier argument that views the EU as established through consociational practices, I argue that EU membership conditionality is a tool to impose institutional reforms in the EU aspirant countries, so their institutions can be receptive to the EU consociational practices once they join the Union. In these countries, the consociational character of conditionality is more visible, since it seeks to impose in aspirant countries the same practices that have brought democratic stability in some member states. The EU does not impose consociational practices on unified societies, but simply seeks to make their institutions receptive to the EU consociational practices. I test these arguments with the cases of institutional reforms in postcommunist Albanian and Macedonia. I conclude that, generally, EU membership manages to change Eastern European leaders’ interests in institutional reforms, but when it cannot, the reforms are almost impossible
Conditioning Democratization : Institutional Reforms and EU Membership Conditionality in Albania and Macedonia /
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Imperial Projects and Anti-Balkanization: A Formal Model of Countries’ Conquest and Unification in a Post-Hegemonic World
No full textThe post-Cold War era has seen a balkanization of the world stage, increasing the UN membership with 34 new states, but also with 10 other functional states that have not acquired yet UN membership. The globalist character of the current world order and the hegemonic role of its single superpower, the US, may have encouraged such geopolitical fragmentation. However, this world order is being challenged increasingly more by emerging new powers, and a shift toward a multipolar world order and its security challenges may spell reverting to military blocks, re-unification and even outright imperialism. In such conditions, countries may need to voluntarily join economies and security resources in a single country or just occupy parts or entire other countries to maximize their security. I build a formal model that analyzes how three factors, economy, security and popular psychology affect each other, and test it with simulated data. The data range of the psychological factor (from – to +), ensures that the model captures a wide range of cases, from brute military occupation (and the subsequent popular opposition) to willful unification (and the subsequent wide popular support)
Attitudes toward Returning Foreign Fighters: The Role of Institutional Trust
No full textThe military defeat of the Islamic State (IS) exposed many countries outside the territories that it controlled with the phenomenon of the returned foreign fighters. The new phenomenon of the returning foreign fighters presents their societies with difficult choices of what to do with those new crime categories and those people who have not committed any crime in their home countries, and whose criminal behavior could be mainly categorized as crime by association. Whereas a number of recent public opinion surveys have measured people’s attitudes regarding the returning ISIS foreign fighters, we still lack any understanding on what drive such attitudes. In order to overcome such gap, we build a series of hypotheses about the public opinion response to the recent phenomenon of the retuning FF. We argue that people’s policy preferences toward state response to returning ISIS foreign fighters reflect their opinions on ISIS, trust in country’s judiciary and religion institutions and religiosity. Relying on three representative samples of public opinion data that we collected in Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia in 2018, we try to fill a gap created by the overreliance of current discussion on people’s opinions on state response to returning ISIS foreign fighters on data public opinion surveys have been conducted in Western countries, leaving a hot spot of ISIS foreign fighters’ origin, the Balkans
Support for the Reinstatement of the Death Penalty as a Protest Attitude Against the Judiciary: The Role of Social Context
No full textWhereas the dominant literature related to people’s attitudes toward the death penalty connect the variability of those attitudes with either fear of crime or fear/distrust toward the judicial system, we test our argument that high support for the death penalty and its reinstatement might reflect protest attitude against an untrustworthy judiciary, and more so when people state their attitudes toward the reinstatement of the death penalty than when they state their principled attitudes toward the death penalty. We frame this as a protest attitude. We replicate two sets of ordered probit models on data from a probability sample of 1414 respondents in Albania collected in 2015 via a cell phone random digit dialing technique (RDD). We found respondents’ support for the reinstatement of the death penalty reflects people’s lack of trust in the judiciary, but not necessarily them prioritizing fight against crime
The Correlates of Global Trumpism: A Study of Three Geopolitical Swing States in Europe
No full textObservers frequently link Donald Trump’s rise in U.S. politics to a global wave of populism that includes everything from the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote to the election of far-right leaders in Brazil. Some even write about a “global Trumpism” by which Trump himself becomes a symbol in public opinion beyond U.S. borders. The extent and sources of foreign support for Trump, however, remain open questions and have yet to be subjected to systematic public opinion research. We open up this research agenda through original, nationally representative surveys conducted in 2018 in two countries representing very different post-Cold-War geopolitical orientations: the traditionally “pro-American” Albania and the more “anti-American” (and pro-Russian) Serbia. Focusing on variation in the degree to which respondents view Donald Trump as treating their own country more favorably than have other recent U.S. presidents, we find that support for Trump abroad is indeed linked to many of the same dispositions that have been found to win him support at home, including a belief in strongman leadership, personal appeal, intolerance of Muslim refugees, skepticism of NATO, and pro-Russian sentiment. While these patterns generally hold across country context, baseline Trump favorability is confirmed to be far higher among the traditionally more “pro-Russian” Serbs in Serbia than among the traditionally more “pro-American” Albanians in Albania. Global Trumpism is not, however, found to be channeling discontent with one’s own country’s politicians as in the US. It is also not consistently reflecting economic dissatisfaction: While Trump appeals to people with low income, the less-educated, and individuals who consider themselves to be economic losers in the post-communist transition, he loses support among people whose own material situation has deteriorated over the previous year. Global Trumpism, then, appears to be rooted more strongly in the cross-context appeals of cultural conservatism, leadership style, and geopolitical orientation than in dissatisfaction with economic trends or one’s own country’s politics
Left–right ideological identification in Kosovo : when sociopolitical attitudes walk through the minefield of ideological self-identification and party preference
No full textPublished online: 26 January 2026Occasionally, people and political parties in Kosovo self-identify with the left–right spectrum. But what does this identification really mean? Holding the findings from the Western democracies about the impact of personality traits on people’s ideological orientation as references, the authors compared how the same traits explain Kosovo citizens’ identification along both a self-reported ideological identification and a left–right ideological index of socio-political issues. The authors argue that the link between personality and orientation may be more universal than one may expect. They find that Kosovars understand their ideological orientation and self-identify along similar explanatory personality traits as in the West, and that the same personality traits better predict the ideological inclinations as defined by people’s sociopolitical attitudes (political compass) than their ideological self-identification. However, there is a mismatch with party preferences. The authors argue that this is a supply-side shortcoming – a consequence of party articulation and policy inconsistency vis-à-vis party ideological self-positioning
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