Do citizens who strongly exhibit populist attitudes support direct democracy? Existing studies tend to claim that populists support direct democracy because of their stealth-democratic orientation or argue that stealth democrats want direct democracy due to the populist nature of stealth-democratic attitudes. Yet, albeit both populists and stealth democrats reject elite rule, they prefer direct democracy for different reasons. Populists support direct democracy as a means to implement the volonté générale, whereas stealth democrats view it as holding politicians accountable for ineffective policy solutions. Our analysis of representative survey data in four European democracies (France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) reveals that individuals with stronger populist attitudes indeed support direct democracy more than citizens with no strong populist attitudes. This effect is observed when controlling for stealth-democratic orientations and when using a measure separating the feature populism shares with stealth democracy – anti-elitism – from the one unique to populism, people-centrism.

Political developments in South Eastern Europe raise serious doubts about the prospects for the effectiveness of the European Union's external democracy promotion via political conditionality. They make it questionable whether the European Union (EU) can repeat its success story as it is widely acknowledged in Central Eastern Europe. With reference to countries characterized by legacies of ethnic conflict, this article shows that incentive-based instruments only trigger democratic change if certain domestic preconditions are met. It will be argued that if national identity runs counter to democratic requirements, this will 'block' compliance by framing it as inappropriate action. The argument is empirically demonstrated using the example of one of the most problematic issue areas in Croatia, for which the EU has only partially succeeded in bringing about democratic change: the prosecution of war crimes.

This article analyses the effectiveness of the EU’s promotion of democratic governance through functional co-operation in the European neighbourhood. In a comparative study of three policy sectors in three countries (Moldova, Morocco, and Ukraine), we show that the EU is capable of inducing neighbouring countries to adopt policy-specific democratic governance provisions in the absence of accession conditionality. In line with the institutionalist hypotheses, we find that effective rule adoption can be secured by strong legal specification of democratic governance elements in the EU sectoral acquis and international conventions. However, successful rule adoption does not necessarily lead to rule application

This article explores whether and under what conditions functional sectoral cooperation between the EU and the countries of the European Neighbourhood Policy promotes democratic governance. In an analysis of four countries (Jordan, Moldova, Morocco, and Ukraine) and three fields of cooperation (competition, environment and migration policy), we show that country properties such as the degree of political liberalization, membership aspirations, and geographic region do not explain differences in democratic governance. Rather, sectoral conditions such as the codification of democratic governance rules, the institutionalization of functional cooperation, interdependence, and adoption costs matter most for the success of democratic governance promotion. We further reveal a notable discrepancy between adoption and application of democratic governance in the selected ENP countries that has not been remedied in the first five years of the ENP.

Does contact with democratic governance make state officials in authoritarian regimes more democratic? While studies of democratic diffusion are built on the inherent assumption that exposure to democratic practices shapes the attitudes of domestic actors toward democracy, scholars of international socialization are more skeptical about such micro-effects. Drawing on insights from sociology and social psychology, I examine what type of cross-national activities can socialize Moroccan state officials into democratic governance. The results of cross-sectional, multivariate regression analyses based on original survey data emphasize that, in authoritarian contexts, transnational linkage manifests the potential to democratize only if it involves practical experience, a condition fulfilled by cooperative exchange within transgovernmental networks, but not by more diffuse types of linkage such as international education and foreign media broadcasting. Freyburg, Tina. (2015) Transgovernmental networks as an apprenticeship in democracy? Socialization into democratic governance through cross-national activities. International Studies Quarterly,