Membership conditionality continues to be a powerful tool by which international organizations (IOs) can improve the democratic standing of the countries that make up their membership. However, results vary depending on the leverage those IOs have on the country seeking membership, as well as on the intensity of conditionality itself. The EU is not simply an IO, but a successful political system, and its leverage might be greater than those of other IOs. The EU introduced membership conditionality with the signing of the Treaty of Amsterdam, 1997, and has used it ever since, with varying results, to affect policy changes in countries aspiring to its membership. Previous research has analyzed EU membership conditionality as an overarching policy aimed at steering democratization rather than as a set of policies trying to affect specific reforms. My argument employs a sectorial contextual approach to studying EU membership conditionality. The sectorial contextual approach provides a framework for explaining the effects of EU membership conditionality on specific sectorial reforms through mid-level theories. These theories view the reform outcome as a result of the interplay between EU and domestic leaders' preferences in that specific reform. Arguably, any change in actors' interests on a certain reform will alter the outcome. These preferences are context specific, and often might not match the preferences of these same actors in other reforms.

I assume that two sets of major actors affect Eastern European institutional reforms: EU institutions and domestic leaders.