Europeanization scholars increasingly debate when and in what ways the European Union (EU) influences domestic politics. This article adopts a 'bottom-up' design and the process-tracing method to examine the influence of the EU enlargement context over the political power of the new social movements in Romania between 2000 and 2004 when the EU acquis was being negotiated. It finds that domestic civil society empowerment resulted from the nexus of three interacting causal pathways: the Executive's desire to accede to the EU; a transnational advocacy network, which included domestic NGOs, reinforcing the Executive's anticipatory self-constraint; and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Executive's self-identification with certain elements of the advocacy network, reinforced by a general concern for their external reputation.

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What made democratic politicians in Central and Eastern Europe exclude themselves from governance of the judiciary? Institutional change in the judiciary is investigated through a diachronic study of the Romanian judiciary which reveals a complex causal nexus. The classical model of the 'external incentives' of EU accession, while explaining a general drive toward revision, played an otherwise marginal role. An institutional template prevailed, promoted by an elite transnational community of legal professionals whose entrepreneurs steering the revision of governance of the judiciary after 1989. The parliamentarians, disempowered by this revision, offered no resistance-a 'veto-player dormancy' that stands revealed as preconditional to such transnational influences.

The literature on Europeanisation in relation to Eastern Europe has posited the material incentives of EU membership as the main driver of domestic reforms aimed at adopting EU rules and norms (conditionality). But this fails to explain puzzling instances where no EU rule exists yet domestic change happens under European influence, or where the rule is a condition yet has little impact. As repositories of (dis)information, transnational networks can embolden a candidate country to breach the rules or influence it to comply with the 'extra-conditionality' the networks themselves create out of their own agendas.

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