The effects of EU enlargement policies on democratic outcomes in the Western Balkan region, 2015-2024

Abstract

This thesis examines the effects of EU enlargement policies on democratic outcomes in Albania, Montenegro and Serbia between 2015 and 2024. It addresses two research questions: to what extent do European Commission institutional reform recommendations translate into substantive democratic outcomes and how does the resulting implementation gap facilitate segmented compliance among Western Balkan candidate states. The thesis employs a mixed-methods comparative case study design, combining qualitative document analysis of European Commission annual accession reports with quantitative analysis of three V-Dem indices (rule of law, political corruption, and freedom of expression) across the observation period. The two datasets are treated as instruments for assessing democratic quality and their divergences are analysed as patterns. The analysis finds that European Commission recommendations corresponded to measurable democratic improvement only in narrow, heavily monitored institutional sectors. In areas such as media freedom and high-level corruption prosecution, formal legislative compliance consistently failed to correspond to improvement in V-Dem indices. The thesis identifies a pattern of segmented compliance across all three cases, whereby domestic elites fulfilled observable institutional benchmarks to satisfy conditionality pressure. Simultaneously, democratic conditions in lower-scrutiny sectors stagnated or declined. This pattern is most clearly observable in Serbia, where constitutional amendments coincided with a continued decline in rule of law indices and in Albania, where the establishment of SPAK (The national anti-corruption agency) coincided with persistently high corruption scores. Montenegro presents a partial exception, with post-2020 improvements in media freedom following a change in government, though judicial institutions deteriorated simultaneously. The findings suggest that the divergence between EC assessments and V-Dem outcomes reflects a structural feature of the EU’s conditionality framework rather than individual state failures.