In the process of the EU's eastern enlargement, the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) have undergone a major process of external governance. What are the main characteristics of the mode of EU external governance in this region, and under which conditions is it most effective for the transfer of EU rules to the CEECs? The article presents the findings of a collaborative international research project including comparative case studies of EU rule transfer in a great variety of policy areas and CEECs. They show that rule transfer is best explained by an external incentives model of governance; its effectiveness varies with the credibility of EU conditionality and the domestic costs of rule adoption. The impact of these conditions, however, depends on two contexts of conditionality: democratic conditionality and acquis conditionality.

This article analyzes the European Union's reactions to breaches of liberal democratic practices in Hungary and Romania during 2012–13 in order to assess its capacity to lock in democracy in the Member States. The article finds that a combination of partisan politics and weak normative consensus thwarted the EU's ability to use the sanctioning mechanism of Article 7. The effectiveness of alternative instruments that EU institutions used – social pressure, infringement procedures and issue linkage – varied across issues and countries. In Hungary, changes to illiberal practices generally remained limited, but differences in the EU's material leverage explain cross‐issue variation. The EU's relative success in Romania suggests that it is not necessarily powerless against democratic backsliding. It might require a demanding constellation of favourable conditions for both social and material pressure, but there are grounds for a more optimistic interpretation that material leverage might be unnecessary if the conditions for social pressure are favourable.

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The Europeanisation of candidate countries and new members is a rather recent research area that has grown strongly since the early 2000s. Research in this area has developed primarily in the context of the EU's eastern enlargement. A small number of theoretically informed book-length studies of the EU's influence on the Central and Eastern European candidate countries have provided a generalisable conceptual framework for this research area, drawing on the debate between rationalist institutionalist and constructivist institutionalist approaches in International Relations and Comparative Politics. This framework makes these studies highly compatible with analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, with which they also share one key empirical finding, namely that the impact of the EU on candidate countries is differential across countries and issue areas. At the same time, the theoretical implications of these findings appear more clear-cut than in the case of the Europeanisation of member states: rationalist institutionalism, with its focus on the external incentives underpinning EU conditionality and the material costs incurred by domestic veto players, appears well-suited to explaining variation in the patterns of Europeanisation in candidate countries. A very recent development within this research agenda is the focus on the Europeanisation of new member states. While the study of the EU's impact during the early years of membership was hitherto primarily a subfield of analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, it has now become an extension of studies of candidate countries by analysing the impact of accession on the dynamics of pre-accession Europeanisation and how durable and distinctive the patterns of candidate Europeanisation are in the post-accession stage.

According to the dominant incentive-based explanation, European Union (EU) conditionality has been particularly effective when the EU offered a credible membership incentive and when incumbent governments did not consider the domestic costs of compliance threatening to their hold on power. However, after the EU's eastern enlargement the influence of international institutions could then be expected to decrease in three different contexts: (i) the new member states after accession; (ii) the current candidate countries; and (iii) the postcommunist countries in the European neighbourhood policy. Yet although the incentive-based explanation receives support in some issue areas, in others, external influence is more enduring than predicted. To the extent that our understanding of the power of incentives is complicated by post-enlargement findings, there are new avenues for research into the full range of mechanisms that international institutions have at their disposal for influencing target states.

The Europeanisation of candidate countries and new members is a rather recent and still comparatively small, but -particularly since 2003 -a fast-growing research area. Research in this area has developed primarily in the context of the EU's eastern enlargement. More recently, a small number of theoretically informed, book-length studies of the EU's influence on the East Central European candidate countries have established the Europeanisation of applicant states as a distinctive research area. These studies fit within a common conceptual framework, which draws on the debate between rationalist and constructivist institutionalist theories in International Relations and Comparative Politics. This framework makes these studies highly compatible with analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, with which they share one key empirical finding, namely that the impact of the EU on candidate countries is differential across countries and issue areas. On the other hand, the theoretical implications of these findings appear more clear-cut than in the case of the Europeanisation of member states: rationalist institutionalism, with its focus on the external incentives underpinning EU conditionality, and on the material costs incurred by domestic veto players, appears well suited to explaining variation in the patterns of Europeanisation in candidate countries. The next stage of this research agenda concerns the impact of accession on the dynamics of preaccession Europeanisation and how durable the patterns of candidate Europeanisation are in the post-accession stage.

When confronting democratic backsliding in its member states, the European Union (EU) cannot rely on material sanctions. There are formidable obstacles to using the one political safeguard that entails material sanctions, namely Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). Moreover, the experience of the EU's preaccession conditionality suggests that even a credible threat of material sanctions is least effective the more severe the breaches of liberal democracy. However, EU interventions without material leverage are not necessarily doomed, as the case of Romania in 2012 shows. Under favourable conditions the EU can thus elicit governments to repeal illiberal practices by relying primarily on social pressure and persuasion. This contribution assesses to what extent novel instruments that EU institutions have developed to confront democratic backsliding meet the requirements for effective social influence. It argues that the Commission's Rule of Law Framework has potential because it meets the criteria of formalisation, publicity, and impartiality. Yet to increase the likelihood of influence, it needs to be applied more consistently and should be embedded in a process of regular monitoring through a democracy scoreboard covering all member states.

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