TY - JOUR
T1 - Monitoring, Money And Migrants
T2 - Countering post-accession backsliding in Bulgaria And Romania
AU - Levitz, Philip
AU - Pop-Eleches, Grigore
N1 - Funding Information:
From a leverage perspective, the EU seems ideally positioned to influence political decisions in the new member states. Since most of the newcomers—and Romania and Bulgaria in particular—were significantly poorer than the EU average, they were well placed to be among the main beneficiaries of EU funding from a number of sources, including the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Cohesion Fund (CF). Romania and Bulgaria, along with a few other ex-communist countries with large and relatively unproductive agrarian sectors, were also prime candidates for rural development funding under the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD). To illustrate the importance of EU financial assistance in the new member states, Figure 1 presents the financial commitments from the main sources of structural funding to the Central and Eastern European countries for the 2007–2013 funding cycle.
PY - 2010/5
Y1 - 2010/5
N2 - Using cross-national governance indicators and evidence from a recent Bulgarian survey, this essay examines political reforms in Bulgaria and Romania since EU accession and, in particular, the 'backsliding' hypothesis-that these countries have abandoned or reversed the reforms they introduced in order to qualify for membership of the European Union. It finds no systematic evidence either that these countries have been backsliding or that their trajectories difler significantly from their first-wave Central and East European neighbours, though governance reforms have slowed after accession. The second part of the essay focuses on the mechanisms responsible for the lack of significant backsliding, emphasising the role of continued conditionality through the safeguard clauses, EU funding and increasing linkage between new and old EU members, including opportunities for East Europeans to work and travel in Western Europe.
AB - Using cross-national governance indicators and evidence from a recent Bulgarian survey, this essay examines political reforms in Bulgaria and Romania since EU accession and, in particular, the 'backsliding' hypothesis-that these countries have abandoned or reversed the reforms they introduced in order to qualify for membership of the European Union. It finds no systematic evidence either that these countries have been backsliding or that their trajectories difler significantly from their first-wave Central and East European neighbours, though governance reforms have slowed after accession. The second part of the essay focuses on the mechanisms responsible for the lack of significant backsliding, emphasising the role of continued conditionality through the safeguard clauses, EU funding and increasing linkage between new and old EU members, including opportunities for East Europeans to work and travel in Western Europe.
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U2 - 10.1080/09668131003647838
DO - 10.1080/09668131003647838
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77950982185
SN - 0966-8136
VL - 62
SP - 461
EP - 479
JO - Soviet Studies
JF - Soviet Studies
IS - 3
ER -