Paper Titles & Abstracts

Since the end of the Cold War, the European Union (EU) has increasingly pursued the promotion of democracy and human rights as a foreign policy goal. This has given rise to an important academic debate about the uniqueness of the EU as a "normative" power in world politics. While this claim has generated a huge scholarly controversy and an entire body of theoretical literature, little empirical work about the EU's human rights and democracy promotion strategies has been carried out so far. Thus, questions such as when, why and how the EU responds to democratic wrongdoing in third countries remain largely unanswered. Seeking to fill this gap, this paper proposes an innovative research design to analyze the Union's use of negative instruments when it addresses human rights abuses and democratic wrongdoing in third countries. While preliminary studies have shed some light into the EU's employment of negative measures, most of these accounts face serious research design biases. To overcome these limitations, this paper first discusses potential strategies for selecting the universe of cases that avoid incurring into selection bias. Subsequently, the paper proposes a variety of solutions to tackle the problems that arise with the operationalization of the dependent variable. Finally, the use of a mixed-methods approach that combines statistical inference and in-depth qualitative analysis is defended. While the use of regression analysis with a large sample allows unveiling existing correlations and contributes to hypotheses-testing, the employment of process-tracing helps to trace causality and gain a more nuanced understanding of the EU's use of negative measures.