The MAXCAP Working Paper No. 3 “Coming Together or Drifting Apart? Political Change in New Member States, Accession Candidates, and Eastern Neighbourhood Countries” by Tanja A. Börzel has been published. You can download the Working Paper here.

This working paper provides the basis for assessing the EU’s external integration capacity in terms of the political change in new member states, current and potential candidates, and neighbourhood countries. First, the paper offers a conceptualization of political change by focusing on democratic and effective governance. Second, it discusses different indicators that allow to measure changes in the democratic quality and governance capacity. Third, it reviews and assesses the macro-quantitative data available.

The paper finds that political change in post-communist countries after the end of the Cold War shows overall progress, which is more pronounced and less diverse with regard to democracy than governance capacity. Still, there are significant disparities in democratic quality and governance capacity that mark a rift between the “old” member states in Western Europe and the “new” member states and candidate countries in Eastern Europe, which becomes even more pronounced when the Eastern neighbours of the EU are included in the analysis.

It is the objective of the MAXCAP Working Paper Series to disseminate the research results of the research consortium to a wide audience, including the academia as well as the general public. Thus, all Working Papers can be downloaded free of charge from our website.