We are pleased to announce that the KFG Working Papers No. 33, 34 and 35 have been published.

 

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No. 33: "Organizing Regulatory Convergence Outside the EU. Setting Policy-Specific Conditionality and Building Domestic Capacities"

The author Julia Langbein deals with the variation in regulatory convergence towards EU rules among different policy fields within the Ukraine as a neighboring country of the European Union, taking the examples of shareholders’ rights and technical standards. She challenges former explanations for such policy change and argues that regulatory convergence is more likely if external actors combine the application of policy-specific conditionality such as access to the European market or multiplex capacity-building measures.

 

No. 34: "Mechanism-Based Thinking on Policy Diffusion. A Review of Current Approaches in Political Science"

The author Torben Heinze reviews and streamlines diffusion literature in political science, finding that diffusion mechanisms largely cluster around two causal arguments determining the desires and preferences of actors for choosing alternative policies. This is, first, the rationality for policy adoption and, second, the impact on the beliefs of actors or on the structural conditions for decision-making. As a result, four basic diffusion mechanisms can be identified: emulation, socialization, learning, and externalities.

 

No. 35: "Good Governance and Bad Neighbors? The Limits of the Transformative Power of Europe"

The authors Tanja A. Börzel and Vera van Hüllen show correla­tions between an EU membership perspective and the successful transformation of neighboring countries. Their core argument is that the prospects of EU membership stabilizes rather than drives the move towards effective and legitimate governance in candidate countries. Thus, a membership perspective is unlikely to either turn around negative or speed up positive developments in the EU’s neighborhood, meaning that the European Neighbourhood Policy lacks transformative power.

 

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All KFG Working Papers are available online or can be ordered in print via transform-europe@fu-berlin.de