ABSTRACT
International institutions use conditionality – the conferral of rewards in exchange for compliance – to direct policy in target states. The use of conditionality has proliferated in recent decades since the ‘first wave’ of conditionality exercised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1950s. A growing range of international institutions has become increasingly engaged in areas of domestic politics the world over. Yet the capacity of such conditionality to elicit its intended response has been notoriously uneven – except in one region – and that is East Central Europe (ECE).
