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Compliance with EU's political criteria in the judiciary of Poland

Jänicke, Max Philipp (2012) Compliance with EU's political criteria in the judiciary of Poland.

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Abstract:In my Bachelor thesis I am intending to find an answer to the following research question: Which factors were most likely to influence compliance with the EU’s political criteria in the Polish judiciary before and after accession to the EU? The units of analysis in this context are policy measures in Poland stressed by the EU to be important to access the EU. In this research external factors are scrutinized, namely policy measures required by the EU to adjust the Polish judiciary to Western-European standards. In this field it is not straightforward, which influence EU conditionality had on compliance with the EU’s political criteria in the field of the judiciary. Therefore, the judiciary needs to be addressed in more detail. In order to answer the research question I address the following sub-questions: 1. What constitutes compliance with the EU’s political conditions for the field of the judiciary? 2. What is political conditionality? 3. What is the effect of size and credibility of EU conditionality on compliance with the EU’s political criteria in the Polish judiciary before accession to the EU? 4. How do determinacy and strength of EU conditionality differ during the accession to the EU and influence compliance with the Polish judiciary? This research aims at explaining the mechanism of EU conditionality in the context of EU enlargement in the policy field of the judiciary. I am planning to highlight how different variables impact on compliance with the EU’s political criteria. This is done in the policy field of the judiciary in Poland in three different periods. Firstly, the period after the establishment of a credible and conditional EU membership perspective in 1998 and 1999 is investigated. Secondly, the period of the accession process closely tied to accession is illustrated, with respect to 2002 and 2003. Finally the period after accession is presented with respect to compliance with the EU’s political criteria for the judiciary, in 2005 and 2006. The last two years are supportive for the research approach, as the effects of EU conditionality largely disappear, due to membership to the EU (Schwellnus & Schimmelfennig, 2006), therefore we can control the effects of our independent variables to a certain degree. My dependent variable is compliance with the EU’s political criteria in the field of the judiciary, whereas the independent variables are the factors, or parameters impacting on the compliance with the EU’s political criteria in the respective field. The factors or parameters, which I am going to illustrate are; size, strength, credibility and determinacy of EU conditionality. Those factors are chosen, as they appear to be dominantly selected to explain successful or unsuccessful functioning of EU conditionality in theory. In theory those factors explain the functioning of EU conditionality in general. Nevertheless each policy field has to be regarded individually with respect to the functioning of EU conditionality. I am going to check for the effects of those factors in the field of the judiciary, which is representing an individual policy field. So Poland’s judiciary is investigated in relation to the impact of EU conditionality and compliance in return. Concerning the case selection of Poland we can underline that Poland is a best-case scenario with respect to the working of EU conditionality in general. Therefore, we might expect that the respective factors affected compliance positively, meaning that they contributed to compliance with the EU’s conditions. On the other hand the policy field of the judiciary is a peculiar field and might reveal ambiguous results about the effects of the chosen factors on compliance with the EU conditions in the judiciary. I am intending to address the research question by carrying out a within case analysis and process tracing in official policy documents written by the EU and an analysis of the NGO Freedom House reports. Moreover data from the CIRI human rights project is supplementing the analysis to scrutinize compliance with EU conditionality in the respective years.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:89 political science
Programme:European Studies BSc (56627)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/62222
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