Post-accession (De)Europeanisation: Patterns of Domestic Institutional Reform in Poland and Romania

Post-accession (De)Europeanisation: Patterns of Domestic Institutional Reform in Poland and Romania

Politics and International Studies

Andrei Ciocoiu

2022

Populism, the rule of law, and democracy are concepts currently circulated public and academic debates throughout Europe, with the European Commission itself accruing more competences in this area. However, the diversity of definitions, legal and democratic cultures and judicial landscapes in the EU not only inhibit the study of the current rule of law breakdowns, but fail to address the crux of the issue at the European level. This study focuses on the implications of the election of populism into national legislatures for EU governance by raising the question “how do developments at concerning national populism in new member states affect the rule of EU law?”. Starting from a theoretical framework centred on rational and sociological understandings of political behaviour, and an overview of the rule of EU law and the EU's enforcement mechanisms, this study employs a linear regression model with panel-corrected standard errors and a Rare Events Logistic Regression to quantify the impact of national populism on one of the most important aspects of the EU legislative process: the transposition of EU directives into national statute books. The study finds that the presence of populists in national legislatures increases the number of infringement cases opened by the European Commission against the respective member state due to a failure to accurately transpose a Directive and uphold the rule of EU law, and it also increases the likelihood that the case will be referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union following continued noncompliance with the Commission’s recommendations and warnings. The evidence points to the issue of the stunted socialisation of the new Member States into EU values and the urgency with which EU institutions must revise – by Treaty reform or otherwise – the safeguards for the rule of EU law.

Populism, the rule of law, and democracy are concepts currently circulated public and academic debates throughout Europe, with the European Commission itself accruing more competences in this area. However, the diversity of definitions, legal and democratic cultures and judicial landscapes in the EU not only inhibit the study of the current rule of law breakdowns, but fail to address the crux of the issue at the European level. This study focuses on the implications of the election of populism into national legislatures for EU governance by raising the question “how do developments at concerning national populism in new member states affect the rule of EU law?”. Starting from a theoretical framework centred on rational and sociological understandings of political behaviour, and an overview of the rule of EU law and the EU's enforcement mechanisms, this study employs a linear regression model with panel-corrected standard errors and a Rare Events Logistic Regression to quantify the impact of national populism on one of the most important aspects of the EU legislative process: the transposition of EU directives into national statute books. The study finds that the presence of populists in national legislatures increases the number of infringement cases opened by the European Commission against the respective member state due to a failure to accurately transpose a Directive and uphold the rule of EU law, and it also increases the likelihood that the case will be referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union following continued noncompliance with the Commission’s recommendations and warnings. The evidence points to the issue of the stunted socialisation of the new Member States into EU values and the urgency with which EU institutions must revise – by Treaty reform or otherwise – the safeguards for the rule of EU law.