Paula M. Pickering

The Constraints on European Institutions' Conditionality in the Western Balkans

THE ESSAYS IN THIS COLLECTION BRING TOGETHER recent field research in the Western Balkans to increase our understanding of the conditions under which European and Euro-Atlantic institutions’ conditionality contributes to or undermines democratic state building. A key strength of these essays is that they call attention to the often underdeveloped and misunderstood complexities of the domestic political situations which influence multinational organisations’ conditionality and vice versa. In addition, they explore diverse policy issues across the Western Balkans to illustrate variation in approach and outcome. While quite a few of the authors contend that selected EU strategies have had a negative impact on aspects of political development in the Western Balkans, none of the authors argue that the Western Balkans would be better off without the possibility of accession to the EU or involvement with other European institutions. Instead, they suggest that the details of EU conditionality deserve greater attention so that they can better cultivate democratic reform that is meaningful both to Western Balkan citizens and that meets European standards.

Explaining the Varying Impact of International Aid for Local Democratic Governance in Bosnia-Herzegovina

International assistance programs for local governance in Bosnia have been most effective in situations where the initial level of governing capacity is low; where local office is competitive; and where local leaders are practical, entrepreneurial consensus builders. Politicization, however, frustrates citizen participation, and civic organizations do not seem to have an impact on local governance performance.

SMS texts on corruption help Ugandan voters hold elected councillors accountable at the polls

Significance Text messages providing salient, nonpartisan, official information on budget corruption prompted Ugandan voters to take the performance of some politicians into account when voting. Holding politicians accountable via elections is a fundamental precursor to effective governance, economic development, and high-quality public services. The results indicate that communication technologies can combine with data on budget management to help voters make better informed choices at the polls and thus have the potential to enhance local electoral accountability by providing information that is difficult for politicians to control and manipulate. Many politicians manipulate information to prevent voters from holding them accountable; however, mobile text messages may make it easier for nongovernmental organizations to credibly share information on official corruption that is difficult for politicians to counter directly. We test the potential for texts on budget management to improve democratic accountability by conducting a large (n = 16,083) randomized controlled trial during the 2016 Ugandan district elections. In cooperation with a local partner, we compiled, simplified, and text-messaged official information on irregularities in local government budgets. Verified recipients of messages that described more irregularities than expected reported voting for incumbent councillors 6% less often; verified recipients of messages conveying fewer irregularities than expected reported voting for incumbent councillors 5% more often. The messages had no observable effect on votes for incumbent council chairs, potentially due to voters’ greater reliance on other sources of information for higher profile elections. These mixed results suggest that text messages on budget corruption help voters hold some politicians accountable in settings where elections are not free and fair.

Public scepticism of internationally supported civil society organisations: norms, citizen priorities, and local groups in post-socialist Serbia

ABSTRACT Despite decades of Western assistance seeking to develop civil societies in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, many local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) lack strong bases in their societies. This field-based study of citizens’ views of Western-aided women’s organisations in four Serbian towns uses frame resonance to explore why. In interviews, many citizens felt that NGOs worked on issues that are abstract, unimportant, narrowly focused, and/or imported, even imposed. Serbian NGOs could increase ties to the public by pursuing activities that better resonate with local norms and priorities, as well as by framing and demonstrating their work as locally responsive.

Path of Democratization: Circuitous in Slovakia But Not in the Czech Republic

Students of political development have not always been good at understanding drastic political change (Myron Weiner and Samuel P. Huntington, Understanding Political Development, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1994, 33). Kevin Deegan-Krause contributes to efforts to remedy this shortcoming. He seeks to answer a fascinating puzzle of post-communist transition: What can account for both the divergence and later reconvergence of democratic development in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia? Not all East European countries sped along a unidirectional path toward liberal democracy when they threw off Soviet-backed communist rule. The zig-zag path of democratization that some post-communist states, such as Slovakia and Ukraine, have taken is a particularly interesting and important aspect of the political transition in Central and Eastern Europe. Unlike some of the cases in Latin America, the culprits for Slovakia’s and some neighbors’ regressions are not military leaders or economic downturns. Deegan-Krause adds to books, such as V.P. Gagnon’s The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005) that help to understand why some countries, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, actually regressed from the process of democratization before accelerating their progress toward democratic consolidation. Both resist blaming the attitudes of the general population for regression or showering the international community’s policies with praise for correcting them. They instead propose more complex models that focus on the dynamics of political competition in post-communist transitions. Deegan-Krause offers a convincing model that highlights the counterproductive role played in new democratizers by strategic politicians, who, when significantly challenged by the dynamics of political competition and weakly constrained by young democratic institutions, choose to exacerbate popular attitudinal differences in the name of accumulating power.