Capitalist diversity and compliance: economic reforms in Central and Eastern Europe after EU accession

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates whether different capitalist varieties in Central and Eastern Europe have different records of post-accession compliance. Drawing on an explorative cluster analysis of 25 EU member states and additional case study evidence, its results suggest that there are two broader clusters of Central and East European countries, which are associated with different Varieties of Capitalism and privilege certain explanatory factors for (non-) compliance over others: I identify a cluster comprising the Baltic States and Slovakia that leans toward a liberal market economy type. I argue that post-accession compliance processes in this cluster are dominated by market-based modes of coordination, in which government ideologies and effectiveness gain greater explanatory power. The second cluster is associated with coordinated market economies marked by a more inclusive political process that privileges the interplay of preferences of various state and non-state actors to explain compliance after EU accession.

KEYWORDS:

• Compliance
• economic Copenhagen Criteria
• EU enlargement
• Europeanization
• Single Market

Acknowledgements

An early version of this paper was presented at the 2014 ECPR Joint Sessions in Salamanca. I am grateful for very helpful comments on previous versions of this paper to all participants of the Joint Sessions, as well as to Markus Ahlborn, Christian Martin, Rainer Schweickert, and to three anonymous reviewers. Excellent research assistance by Ferdinand Dreher is also gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors are my sole responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Their cluster analysis includes indicators on the size of a given government, transfer spending, regulation, as well as variables measuring income equality, innovation capacity, and fiscal debt. Importantly, the regulation variable (Gwartney et al. 2013) does not capture incompatibilities with the EU acquis.

2 Data have been used from the November assessment to determine the size of the deficit and the number of infringement cases for each year.

3 The Single Market Scoreboard assesses member states’ performance in a variety of areas related to the Single Market. An up to date list of all directives included in this assessment can be found on the websites of the European Commission (European Commission 2015).

4 Despite the lack of a clear compliance threshold, one may still speak of ‘compliance’ with economic Copenhagen Criteria; a practice that is also common with regard to the rather vaguely defined political Copenhagen Criteria (see e.g., Schimmelfennig et al. 2003).

5 Note that some of the case study evidence also draws on pre-accession developments. As the accession conditionality can be assumed to have ‘suppressed’ domestic compliance dynamics, however, this should be a conservative assessment for the argument under scrutiny here.

Additional information

Funding

Research leading to these results has received funding by the project ‘Welfare, Wealth, Work for Europe’ (www.foreurope.eu) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 290647.

Notes on contributors

Esther Ademmer

Esther Ademmer is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for the World Economy in Kiel and at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.