4.1 Gaps in the literature

At the same time, gaps and new directions of research have become clearer. One of the more obvious gaps is the almost exclusive focus on applicants from the eastern enlargement. Another can be filled through a better specification of mediating factors at the domestic level.

4.1.1 Comparisons across enlargement rounds

The research agenda on candidate country Europeanisation has developed almost exclusively in the context of the EU’s eastern enlargement. As the introduction to this review alluded to, the EU’s impact on the applicants in this enlargement round has a number of distinctive elements which were particularly conducive to the emergence of a new research programme. Yet even if in previous enlargement rounds some of these elements were not as distinctive (such as the extent of the acquis, the use of explicit conditionality, the socio-economic starting conditions of the candidates), more comparative insights are desirable, precisely in order to establish to what extent the conceptual frameworks developed in the context of eastern enlargement allow us to understand candidate country Europeanisation – and the Europeanisation of non-member states – more generally.

4.1.2 Domestic politics

A conceptual gap that is becoming more evident is – maybe somewhat surprisingly – a better conceptualisation of domestic politics. On the one hand, the conceptual frameworks that dominate in theoretically informed studies of candidate country Europeanisation are informed by approaches from International Relations, specifically on the domestic impact of international institutions. At the same time, however, a particular strength of most of these studies is precisely that they stress the importance of domestic politics (see also Scherpereel 2006

: 136) as factors that mediate the EU’s influence, e.g. through veto players and adoption costs, or normative rule resonance.

On the other hand, there is a certain imbalance in the extent to which the literature currently identifies domestic and international mediating factors. For example, while Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2005c ) elaborate greatly on international factors that can affect governments’ cost/benefit calculations, the category for (rationalist) domestic factors remains a rather undifferentiated ‘domestic adoption costs’ or ‘veto players’. The problem is not that this approach neglects domestic politics. It is more the case that the domestic factors that most of the literature emphasises – veto players, actor density, domestic costs – partly remain rather broad and are therefore often subject to ad hoc operationalisation.

Studies of the EU’s impact on liberal democratic principles have gone furthest towards a better specification of domestic costs. Distinctions between liberal and illiberal/anti-liberal (and mixed) states or party constellations (Schimmelfennig 2005 ; Vachudová 2005 ) and in particular more detailed analyses of the extent to which liberal vs. strict ethnic policy preferences are represented in parliament (Kelley 2004 ) might provide good indicators of domestic opposition in this particular area. The literature on partial (post-communist) reforms in Comparative Politics (e.g. Hellman 1998 ) also offers useful indicators for specifying some of the domestic costs for ruling elites of forgoing the benefits of partial reform. Yet, the distinction between domestic governmental party constellations still remains somewhat broad, and cannot be used easily as indicators for the EU’s impact on socio-economic policies. In that area, comparative politics and comparative political economy can make stronger contributions, such as in Andonova’s study (Andonova 2003 ) of environmental policy which uses the internationalisation of an economic sector as an indicator for preferences about harmonisation with EU legislation.