Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe European Union has sought to democratise its post-communist neighbours for the past three decades, starting with Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. Since the end of the wars in Former Yugoslavia in 2000, the EU first pursued closer integration with the Western Balkans followed by the goal of enlargement. However, despite intensive EU involvement, the fight against corruption has stagnated or deteriorated in post-communist Europe, particularly in Former Yugoslavia. The central question in the article is whether indirect EU influence has led municipal officials—who are at the front line of vital distributive decision-making for citizens at the local level—to imitate (or emulate) attitudes related to corruption and to informality in line with EU norms. The article focuses on the case of Serbia, where anti-corruption progress has been particularly slow. Using a survey of Serbian municipal officials, the article examines whether indirect EU influence via involvement in policy implementation affected attitudes towards informal payments, and through a vignette-based survey experiment, whether those involved in EU-compliant policy implementation are less accepting of local political elite corruption.

The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the associated Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have had far-reaching health, economic, social and political impacts. The latter is the focus of this research note, which proposes using a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the electoral impact of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection rates. The approach is illustrated using data from the 2020 Croatian parliamentary election. The outcomes of interest are the vote shares for the dominant Croatian Democratic Union party, as well as the turnout. The analysis concludes that there is no evidence that reported county-level infection rates affected Croatian Democratic Union support or turnout. However, results using this approach may be affected by the statistical power of the analysis, issues related to causal identification and reliability of infection rate measures. Nonetheless, the difference-in-differences approach can potentially be applied in contexts around the world to estimate the electoral impact of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection rates.

The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the associated Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have had far-reaching health, economic, social and political impacts. The latter is the focus of this research note, which proposes using a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the electoral impact of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection rates. The approach is illustrated using data from the 2020 Croatian parliamentary election. The outcomes of interest are the vote shares for the dominant Croatian Democratic Union party, as well as the turnout. The analysis concludes that there is no evidence that reported county-level infection rates affected Croatian Democratic Union support or turnout. However, results using this approach may be affected by the statistical power of the analysis, issues related to causal identification and reliability of infection rate measures. Nonetheless, the difference-in-differences approach can potentially be applied in contexts around the world to estimate the electoral impact of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection rates.

The book analyses the changing roles of international agencies, governmental bodies, non-governmental organisations, and local communities around major road-building environmental impact assessment processes in order to examine whether the influence of the European Union has transformed environmental governance in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Serbia

AbstractThis article assesses whether different types of exposure to European Union (EU) modes of socialization are associated with differences in attitudes towards corruption, using Serbia as case study. Drawing on a survey of Serbian municipal health‐care officials, the article complements existing research on the impact of EU conditionality on attitudes at the national level, while also contributing to the understanding of the impact of domestic variables on Europeanization. Thus, the article's contribution to the wider literature is to interrogate the premise that in order to deliver substantive reform, attitudes and practices need to be changed via exposure to EU tutelage and processes. Our data suggest that the type of interaction that officials have with the EU and its processes matters. While those involved in EU harmonization activities were significantly more critical of clientelistic behaviour, there is no significant association between attitudes and doing daily EU‐related work or attending EU training.

The post-conflict case of Bosnia-Herzegovina provides a challenging case for the approaches employed by the European Union to bolster state and non-state actor capacities related to environmental governance in post-socialist states. This article examines four major consultative environmental impact assessment processes in Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to identify factors that either enable or impede the development of multi-level environmental governance at the state and sub-state entity levels. Larger environmental non-governmental organisations provide scientific opinions and smaller organisations lack capacity to participate at all. The complex configuration of state institutions, compounded by inadequate staffing and funding, creates impediments for effective governmental hierarchy during environmental impact assessments. However, international financial institutions and technical consultants involved in environmental impact assessments have taken a pivotal tutelage role to familiarise local stakeholders with best practice, which has led to some improvements in multi-level environmental governance during environmental impact assessments in Bosnia-Herzegovina, though the impact is dependent on staff retention in Bosnian public bodies.