ABSTRACT
The “Europeanization” approach gained ground after EU membership became a priority for the leaders of the candidate-countries in the early 1990s. An institutionalist focus tended to dominate in these studies, some of which focused on “rational institutionalism,” which investigates phenomena such as incentives, preferences, and the calculation of benefits, while others concentrated on “sociological institutionalism,” which explores how collective experience is mobilized as well as people’s abilities to select from available options (Cowles et al. 2001; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2005). Both of these orientations have attempted to describe changes caused by direct and indirect EU pressures at ideal, institutional, and political levels, with a particular interest in how these changes have affected member-states’ and their partners’ deliberations and decisionmaking processes. Pressures were applied via a range of mechanisms intended to remedy certain asymmetries between the EU15 and EU membership candidates.
