Abstract
Did NATO expansion foster democratic development in Eastern Europe? Past scholarship offers conflicting answers to this question. We seek to bring clarity by focusing on the 2004 NATO expansion to include the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. We leverage the fact that we now as many years of data since NATO entry as we have between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 2004 NATO expansion. We also use newly available and highly refined data on regime type. We show that NATO membership and anticipation thereof had little to no influence on democratic development in Eastern Europe. However, anticipation of European Union membership appears to have bolstered democratic development. Although the results cannot fully rule out NATO playing a secondary role, they make clear that NATO membership was not a necessary condition for democratic survival in Eastern Europe.
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