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This paper focuses on the current political and socio-economic situation in the two most recent EU member states, Bulgaria and Romania. Overall, the post-accession period in both countries has been comparable to that in the East-Central European members that had joined the Union on 1 May 2004. However, there have been some significant differences in the postaccession path of Bulgaria and Romania, which set them apart from the rest of the EU-10, as well as among themselves. For instance, the problem of corruption has been a particularly salient theme for the political elites of both countries and it led to the paralysis of the cabinet in Romania during the first year of its membership and to the rise of powerful populist alternatives in Bulgaria. What has probably been even more distinguishing in the cases of Bulgaria and Romania is their apparent inability to swiftly deal with the political and social challenges emerging after accession, as well as to adequately respond to the process of Europeanization. The main reason for this has been the unfinished political and socioeconomic transformation of both countries, accompanied by the consolidation of certain 'reserve domains', occupied by the former secret services and semi-mafia structures.

It is often claimed that the EU suffers from a range of, occasionally, difficult-to-identify legitimacy problems. This is mainly because of its complex internal structure and way of functioning – i.e. between various levels of governance and centres of decision-making authority. This paper focuses on the role of citizens and national elites in granting support for the EU. The bottom-up approaches of legitimisation are thus explored. Special attention is paid to the participatory opportunities for citizens and national elites in multilevel governance.

Defence date: 9 March 2003 ; Examining Board: Prof. Grzegorz Ekiert (Harvard University) ; Prof. Peter Mair (Leiden University) ; Prof. Philippe C. Schmitter (EUI) ; Prof. Jan Zielonka (EUI, supervisor) ; First made available online on 25 April 2018 ; This thesis generally deals with the process of démocratisation in post-communist Eastern Europe. Specifically, it explores the latter stages of this process: the consolidation and persistence of democracy, following the demise of the ancien regime and the conclusion of democratic transition. In other words, it tries to describe the conditions for and consequences of increased regime stability and legitimacy after the actual establishment of democracy. In theory, this usually happens after the initial holding of free and fair elections and the fulfilment of some other minimal criteria of political democracy like the existence of a multiparty system, the protection of the freedom of speech and the pluralism of media, the adoption of the constitution and the foundation of the basic political institutions of a democratic state. In practice, the consolidation of democracy is a never-ending process and even long-established democracies periodically face the problems of deconsolidation and reorganisation of their internal structure. This research, which began in the second half of the 1990s, has followed the majority of these scientific trends quite closely and has taken over some of the theoretical ideas, conceptual tools and research methods of the previous analytical explorations of Eastern Europe and other regions of the world. It has become progressively integrated within the mainstream comparative démocratisation studies, which was, and continues to be, the predominant research current focusing on democratic transition and consolidation. At the same, this thesis has acquired certain independent normative features and tried to comprehensively describe the conditions for consolidation of democracy in a post-communist context. The critical analysis of most of the recent theories of démocratisation has proceeded by testing several alternative hypotheses regarding the future of democracy in the region. Moreover, the normative research on the establishment of political democracy in Eastern Europe has been supplemented with an original method of conceptualising and measuring the degree of consolidation and the quality of democracy. Together with the extensive theoretical analysis of the different paths towards démocratisation, the final empirical section, featuring the innovative statistical Index o f Démocratisation (IDEM), are the two most significant contributions of this thesis.