Do Eastern European courts effectively constrain politicians and uphold the rule of law? Criminal prosecution of grand (high-level) corruption can further the central principle of equal responsibility under the law by demonstrating that even powerful political actors have to submit to the laws of the land. This article introduces the Eastern European Corruption Prosecution Database , which contains entries for all cabinet ministers (927 in total) who served in a government that held office in one of seven post-Communist Eastern European countries since the late 1990s. The systematic data collection reveals that Bulgaria, Romania and Macedonia consistently indict more ministers than Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Poland; Slovakia has barely indicted anyone. We aim to start a research agenda by formulating hypotheses about which countries will see more corruption prosecutions and which ministers’ characteristics would make them more likely to face the court. We use the database to begin testing these hypotheses and find some evidence for several associations. We find no strong evidence that EU conditionality or membership raises the profile of the grand corruption issue or leads to more indictments. Party politics seems to affect the frequency of corruption indictments more than the structure and behavior of legal institutions. Indictment rates are lower when a former Communist party controls the government and individual ministers from junior coalition partners are more vulnerable to indictment than other ministers. The existence of a specialized anti-corruption prosecution or a more independent judiciary do not seem to lead to the indictment of more ministers on corruption charges. Finally, we discuss avenues of future research that our database opens, both for the analysis of country-level and individual-level variation.

Through the Eastern Partnership the EU specifically attempts to strengthen democracy in Georgia. Lacking strong conditionality, the EU has to rely on a different approach to democracy assistance, such as a network governance mode. The implementation of EU policies has led to an expanding institutional network where NGO inclusion has been strengthened. However, this form of network governance operates within the realities of the domestic political and international context, influencing its effectiveness and impact. Despite the increased involvement of NGOs in EU policies the role and impact of civil society within Georgian politics and society has remained limited.

This paper is designed to shed some light on possible impacts of globalization and Europeanization on social security reforms in one of the new EU member state - Lithuania. The paper is based on 67 expert interviews conducted with the political elite, academics, journalists, senior civil servants, interest group representatives and the economic elite. The paper highlights the higher influence of globalization through the activities of such supranational agencies as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund compared to the impact of cognitive Europeanization on social security reforms.

The goal of this paper is to analyse the impact the EU has had on Czech women’s groups since the1990s. Drawing on both Europeanization and social movement theories, the first section defines the theoretical framework of the paper. The second section is focused on the impact of changes in the funding of women’s groups which, since the end of the1990s, have relied more than before on European funding. The third section analyses the shift in the political context and the domestic political opportunity structure in the Czech Republic that has occurred in connection with the accession process. The fourth section analyzes transnational cooperation for which new opportunities have appeared with the EU’s eastward expansion. The paper concludes by summarizing its main findings.

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.

This article represents a contribution to the debate over the Europeanization of political parties, one of the hot topics in contemporary political science. It explores the extent of Europeanization in political parties represented in the lower chamber of the Parliament of the Czech Republic by means of an analysis of party election manifestoes. The extent of Europeanization in these documents is analyzed using a bi-dimensional conceptualization. The first we call the quantitative dimension , assesses the space taken by the topic of European integration in each manifesto. The second one we call the qualitative dimension . This, using the analysis of content, measures the degree to which the European integration issue is elaborated in the programs. Using this conceptualization, we analyze the election manifestoes of five Czech political parties in the period 1996–2006.

The European Union (EU) has encouraged democratic development in a number of post-communist states. This article examines the extent of EU involvement in Ukraine and its results. It notes that there has been a substantial disconnect between the rhetoric of Ukraine’s ‘‘European Choice’’ and authoritarian trends in the country. Ukraine signed a series of agreements with the EU, but membership in the organization was never offered. The EU’s interest in Ukraine, however, was rather meager and it never gained means to have much leverage. As authoritarianism became more pronounced, the EU began to disengage from the country. The article argues that part of the problem was that the EU never applied political conditionality to Ukraine as it had with other states. The ‘‘Orange Revolution’’ opens up new possibilities and challenges, and the EU now must come to grips with a more democratically and Western-oriented leadership.