How effective and relevant is European Union political conditionality for the promotion of democracy in third countries? This article reports the results of a panel study of 36 countries of the East European and Mediterranean neighbourhood of the EU for the years 1988—2004. The analysis shows robust and strong effects of EU political conditionality on democracy in the neighbouring countries if the EU offers a membership perspective in return for political reform. Absent the offer of membership, however, EU incentives such as partnership and cooperation do not reliably promote democratic change. The analysis controls for economic development and transnational exchanges as two alternative potential causes of democratization. Although economic and geographical factors have an impact on democratization in the European neighbourhood as well, EU political conditionality remains a significant influence.

There is growing consensus among sociologists that since the 1980s the world has experienced a process of accelerated time-space-compression (Harvey, 1989; see also Martinelli, 2005). Transnational social interactions have not only become more numerous but also considerably faster and more widespread. Moreover, there has been an impressive increase in the number of institutions regulating these interactions. Institutions of global governance have challenged the sovereign power of nation-states and the state's role in world politics is being reshaped. As a consequence of these changes, an axiom of world-systems theory has been accepted by scholars of other theoretical approaches as a premise of sociology altogether: to make sense of social processes on the national or sub-national level, adequate models must also take into account global influences.While national societies are increasingly influenced by the global environment, scholars disagree on whether this process of globalization produces 'convergence of societies toward a uniform pattern of economic, political, and even cultural organization' (Guillén, 2001: 244) or rather provokes more pronounced divergence. For Guillén ( 2001), this is one of the five key debates in contemporary globalization discussions. He identifies three ideal-typical theoretical positions in this debate: global convergence, global divergence, and the creation of global-local hybrids that has sometimes been referred to as 'glocalization' (Roland Robertson) and 'creolization' (see Boli, this issue).In its most orthodox formulation, the global convergence hypothesis predicts the world's complete McDonaldization (Ritzer, 1993), that is, the conquest of the entire world by organizations, institutions and cultural practices originating in the western core nations. Adherents of the global divergence position, however, argue that up to now structural and cultural differences across nations have not only persisted but in some respects even grown more pronounced. Anthony Giddens (1991( , cited in Guillén, 2001, for example, points out the ambivalent and dialectical nature of contemporary global changes: 'Globalization has to be understood as a dialectical phenomenon, in

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Advanced industrial democracies experience increasing inequalities or at least a new trade-off between equality and growth: liberal welfare states opted for growth and accepted rising inequality, while conservative welfare states tried to hold back inequality, thereby accepting lower growth. The rise in inequality is widely interpreted with regard to globalization and technological change. This article contrasts this interpretation with an alternative based on the argumentation of Kuznets’s inverted U-turn which is individually reformulated as some diffusion process of some qualification. While threats such as globalization can be reformulated as a ‘negative diffusion process’, a positive diffusion process is also possible. The two alternative mechanisms are identical regarding inequality measures as the Gini coefficient, but they are differentiated in their trend expectations with regard to income distributions’ skewness. In the globalization model, increasing inequality is accompanied first by a fall and later by a rise in skewness, while the qualification diffusion model shows the opposite sequence: rising to a maximum and falling back later on. Due to their different position in the inequality—growth trade-off, liberal and social democratic welfare states are assumed to be ahead in this evolution, while conservative welfare states lag behind. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study, skewness estimations of logged monetary income distributions form an unbalanced panel with 69 observations from 16 OECD countries. A fixed effects regression for the skewness time trend in conservative welfare states and the trend difference for the two other welfare state groups shows strong support for the positive diffusion model, giving rise to the expectation that inequality can and will decrease again.