Prior to the 2004 EU enlargement, there was widespread optimism about the democratic prospects of Central and Eastern Europe. James Dawson, Lise Herman and Aurelia Ananda examine how this optimism emerged from political science literature and what the real-world effects were on Central and Eastern European democracies.
In 2003, Andrew Moravcsik and Milada Anna Vachudova wrote that through enlargement, “the EU will have had a hand in building the most unified, prosperous, and free continent of Europe in modern history”. Scanning the democratisation literature of the early 21st century, it is interesting to reflect that effusive statements of this kind are relatively hard to find. Somehow though, the optimistic narrative of “the successful democratisation of Central and Eastern Europe” prevailed.
Indeed, this narrative became so widely accepted that journalists took this idea for granted while more equivocal, guarded and critical accounts hardly seemed to permeate the discourse. EU institutions themselves were sufficiently convinced about the progress of democratisation in the region that membership was granted to all ten Central and Eastern European candidate states 2004-2007. But how and why did optimism prevail?
Disciplinary biases
This question deserves investigation given the current context of democratic malaise across the region including in Hungary and Poland, formerly “poster-child” cases of democratisation. To probe the issue further, we used wordsearches to identify the entire body of scholarship on Central and Eastern European politics published in the top 20 generalist political science and top 5 post-communist area studies journals between 2000 and 2015.
Subsequently, we randomly sampled 500 of these papers and subjected them to qualitative coding and then quantitative analysis. We corralled this data into two halves, resulting in one research article on how political science did, and another considering the feedback loop between EU-policy making and scholarship. Both have recently been published open access.
Our findings are revealing, both with respect to how this optimistic narrative prevailed and how disciplinary biases can affect knowledge production in political science more broadly. Our entire sample was diverse, barely tilting optimistic in its conclusions (39.92%) over pessimistic ones (34.13%). However, positivist-leaning criteria that includes rational institutional theoretical frameworks largely determined whether research would be published in higher-impact (top 20) journals and, even more tellingly, how much other scholars would cite a paper regardless of the journal in which it was published.
Research displaying more optimistic conclusions was also more likely to focus on EU accession (inclusive of enlargement and conditionality) as a main topic and be written by West European-affiliated scholars, while also being over-represented in more prestigious journals.
In turn, papers using qualitative methodologies, with a focus on civil societies and from authors based in the post-Communist region were more likely to reach pessimistic conclusions, which is to say display greater caution with respect to the extent of democratisation. These accounts were also under-represented in higher-impact general journals and more likely to be published in area studies journals.
The effects of optimism
In our second article, we conclude that such disciplinary biases are likely to have had real-world effects. We find that both EU policymakers and the most influential research in political science shared a bias towards optimism structured by common assumptions: a procedural understanding of democracy, a rational institutionalist belief in the EU’s capacity to bring these procedures about with the use of incentives and the related assumption that socio-cultural dimensions of democracy would eventually follow institutions.
Identifying the exact mechanisms through which scholarship affected policymaking and vice versa was beyond the remit of our study. However, we did find that articles that were closer in terms of rationalist analytical approach and thematic focus to the EU’s own monitoring were overwhelmingly more likely to be rewarded with attention in the form of citations.
For example, advocates of the “external incentives model”, built on rational institutionalist foundations stressing EU leverage, led with an affirmation of the EU’s sticks-and-carrots approach to political progress in the region, with problems generally relegated to caveats and disclaimers. Critical studies of democratic progress in the region, in turn, paid greater attention to worrisome dynamics within civil society and political culture in the region, yet these accounts lacked visibility.
Pluralism and separation
Taken together, our findings demonstrate the potential benefits of greater methodological and theoretical pluralism in the discipline – a more balanced pattern of citations and publications might have contributed, in this specific case, to better outcomes in terms of knowledge building.
Our results might also point to the need for greater separation between academia, and the spheres of political power they study. Today, scholars increasingly seek funding from policy actors and are assessed on the extent to which they can demonstrate “impact” on decision-makers, factors that may make them more likely to adopt the language and concerns of the institutions they study. This risk may be heightened in the case of the EU, which is one of the largest funders of social science in the world.
For more information, see the authors’ accompanying articles in Problems of Post-Communism and Comparative European Politics.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: European Union
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