Research Papers

The paper addresses the question of why democratization in Southeast Europe fails to reach levels comparable to Central Eastern Europe. The main argument is that the dominance of illiberal parties over regime change produced a mode of rule which coalesced into a fundamental feature of these regimes that continues to obstruct the establishment of rule of law. In a nutshell, the argument is that stagnant democratization in Southeast Europe is due to a discrepancy between formal democratic institutions and lingering authoritarian practice of politics. The theoretical framework is empirically tested by applying fsQCA on a dataset of fourteen European post-communist countries from Southeast and Central Eastern Europe. The findings establish illiberal party dominance as the central part of the causal recipe for stalled democratization. Illiberal party dominance connects all Southeastern European cases analysed in the study (Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania and Serbia), with the qualification that in some cases this explanatory factor is combined with inhibiting historical legacies, while in others the causal recipe includes the occurrence of a violent conflict that postponed EU integration. The causal recipe for successful democratization, which encompasses Central Eastern European cases, is a combination of facilitating historical legacies and early EU integration.