Reading Group Democracy in Europe
In this iteration of the interdisciplinary reading group, we will discuss a text by Lise Herman et al., on: 'A Climate of Optimism? EU Policy-making, Political Science and the Democratisation of Central and Eastern Europe (2000-2015)’.
| A Centre for European Studies research event | |
|---|---|
| Date | 30 November 2022 |
| Time | 10:00 to 11:00 |
| Place | Zoom |
| Provider | Centre for European Studies |
Event details
Abstract
Democratic erosion in the EU’s Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states has confounded EU policy-makers. In this paper, we investigate the assumptions behind the climate of optimism about CEE democratisation that prevailed in EU decision-making before and after the 5th and 6th enlargements, and the extent to which political science participated in this intellectual climate. Based on a qualitative analysis of EU decision-making in the early 21st Century and a quantitative analysis of 500 randomly-sampled papers published between 2000-2015 we find that both policy makers and the most influential research in political science shared a bias towards optimism structured by common assumptions: a procedural understanding of democracy, a rational institutionalist belief in the EU’s capacity to bring these procedures about with the use of incentives and the related assumption that socio-cultural dimensions of democracy would eventually follow institutions. We argue that these common assumptions help to explain both the EU’s failure to pre-empt and respond proportionately to democratic erosion, and the failure of our discipline to check that optimism.
