Structural weaknesses and the role of the dominant political party: democratic backsliding in Croatia since EU accession

ABSTRACT

Croatia is regarded as a success story of the EU’s enlargement policy. However, this narrative conflicts with the situation on the ground and with expert surveys, which depict incremental, yet persistent democratic backsliding in recent years. A shift towards illiberal practices, primarily focused on the liberal part of the liberal-democratic nexus, is taking place. This research aims to explore the prevalence and causes for the re-emergence of illiberal practices in Croatia by employing an interpretive method to evidence gathered from media articles and research reports published 2013–2019. The use of illiberal policies by the governing Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in three areas of the political system – the capture of independent agencies, control of the judiciary, and the weakening of independent media – is found to be the driver of democratic backsliding. Causes are found in structural reasons linked to the dominant party. Without either internal power-sharing constraints or external EU conditionality pressure, the HDZ has been able to take advantage of structural weaknesses of the system it built and shaped during the 1990s.

KEYWORDS:

• Croatia
• Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ)
• democratic backsliding
• institutional capture
• illiberal politics
• structural weakness

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, as well as Vera Stojarova and Damir Kapidžić for the excellent editorial work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Personal conversation with N1 editors and journalists.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper was funded by the University of Zagreb—Faculty of Law 2019 grant, as a part of the ‘New Croatian Legal System’ project.

Notes on contributors

Dario Čepo

Dario Čepo is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Croatia. He holds a PhD in Comparative Politics from the University of Zagreb. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Harriman Institute of the Columbia University in New York City, 2013–2014. Currently he leads a Jean Monnet-funded project on European values in new member states. His research interests are parliaments and the political system of the European Union. He published a book Političke institucije Europske unije (Political Institutions of the European Union, 2013), and a university handbook Uvod u političku znanost (Introduction to Political Science, 2014; coauthored with Slaven Ravlić).