Publication

This paper analyzes and compares how democracy and governance assessments evaluate Southeast European countries, based on datasets and expert studies from the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, the Polity project and the World Bank Institute. It finds that the differential placement of states on levels of relations between the EU and Southeast Europe correlates with the ranking of states emerging from the surveys, while there is scarce evidence of a clear causality in either direction. The main focus is on the stability of democratic institutions.