Differential Europeanization in Eastern Europe: The Impact of Diverse EU Regulatory Governance Patterns

Abstract

When analysing processes of domestic institutional and political change in Central and Eastern Europe, political scientists frequently refer to the concept of Europeanization. This article focuses the policy‐analytical framework as one central Europeanization approach and addresses the question of whether this approach is applicable to explain domestic change beyond the core of EU member states. The policy‐analytical approach systematically analyses the impact of different modes of EU governance on process and outcome of national institutional and policy change. The article demonstrates that in distinguishing the different potential of compliance, competition and communication to trigger domestic adjustments, the policy‐analytical approach proves to be a useful tool for predicting domestic change in states outside the EU. It helps generate differentiated hypotheses about the potential impacts of EU policies in Central and Eastern European candidate countries that are likely to join the EU in the foreseeable future and in non‐member states with only minimal or no accession prospects.