The demand-side politics of EU enlargement: democracy and the application for EU membership

Most theoretical arguments about enlargement have sought to elucidate why the EU may have an interest in accepting CEECs. While these 'supply-side' arguments are essential building blocks of a comprehensive account of enlargement, they need to be complemented by a theory that seeks to understand the politics and economics of enlargement from a demand-side perspective. We show in a formal model how a transition country's demand for EU membership relates to both regime type and its willingness to implement economic reforms. Specifically, we argue that leaders in more democratic regimes had a greater incentive to push ahead with costly 'institution-building reforms' which, in effect, aligned their countries with EU rules and institutions. The impetus for continuing pro-integration regulatory reforms came from the greater electoral accountability of these leaders. We test this claim with a Cox continuous time survival model with time-dependent covariates. The results confirm the dominant impact of increasing political participation on the likelihood of an EU application.