In academic and public debates, external actors have been considered to promote their rules most effectively in third countries in cases of high and asymmetric interdependence. Hence, high interdependence of European Neighborhood Countries (ENC) with Russia has been discussed as a major...

The EU’s Eastern Enlargement is considered to be one of the (few) successful experiments of promoting good – both effective and legitimate – governance. By contrast, the EU’s transformative power appears to be weak or non-existent vis-à-vis its (old) neighbors in the South and its (new)...

Why is regulatory convergence towards EU rules more successful in some policy fields than in others within one EU neighboring country? By comparing Ukraine’s convergence towards EU rules in the field of shareholders’ rights and technical standards, I challenge prominent explanations for...

Despite theoretical and methodological progress in what is now coined as the third generation of diffusion studies, explicitly dealing with the causal mechanisms underlying diffusion processes and comparatively analyzing them is only of recent date. As a matter of fact, diffusion research has...

The EU seeks to transform the domestic structures of the Western Balkan countries in order to foster peace, stability and prosperity in the region ridden by war and ethnic conflict. Unlike in case of the Mediterranean and Newly Independent States, the EU has even offered its South Eastern...

Environmental policy has become an important area of European Union (EU) policy making, even though it had not originally been foreseen in the Treaty of Rome. Its emergence in the early 1970s can be understood as a result of a transfer of the novel policy idea of the environment to the European...

How do countries make policy in an uncertain world? Do policymakers look inward, rationally designing policies to fit domestic interests, ideas, and institutions? Or do they look outward, imitating policy elements from other countries? And if the latter, where do they look? Focusing on the...