Democracy Promotion by Functional Cooperation / Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century (PDF)

Tina Freyburg works as an Assistant Professor in the Politics Department of the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, where she also directs the Centre for the Studies of Democratisation. Her current research projects explore new avenues in the study of democracy and democratization.

Sandra Lavenex is Professor of European and International Politics and member of the Global Studies Institute at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) as well as a visiting professor at the Collège d'Europe. Her main research interests concern questions of international governance and EU external relations.

Frank Schimmelfennig is Professor of European Politics and member of the Center for Comparative and International Studies at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). His main research interests are in the theory of international institutions and European integration and, more specifically, in EU enlargement, differentiated integration, democracy promotion, and democratization.

Tatiana Skripka is Assistant Professor at the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, Maastricht University (The Netherlands). Her research interests lie in the fields of EU external relations, democracy promotion, democratization, international institutions and comparative regional integration.

Anne Wetzel is Postdoc Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim (Germany). She has co-led a European Union (EU) Jean Monnet Information and Research Activity on EU democracy promotion and has published widely on the topic. She is also interested in the EU in international organizations.

“Book’s main aim is to establish an alternative view of how the EU tries to promote democracy in its neighbourhood: through functional cooperation that may lead to democratic governance in the partner country. … EU bureaucrats will read it with great pleasure, as it claims to not simply repeat the often-heard criticism of ‘EU failure’ and ‘EU loss of credibility’ in democracy promotion, but to draw a more nuanced picture of the success of EU democracy support in its neighbourhood.” (Jan Claudius Völkel, Democratization, Vol. 23 (5), August, 2016)

“Book’s main achievement is the construction of a comprehensive design, documented by empirical findings, to study the full democratising potential of the EU democratic governance model in three very different policy environments, stressing the main differences that arise in practice between the adoption phase and the implementation phase. … a valuable scholarly contribution that shows that, if we are to successfully re-examine EU democracy promotion at this time of crisis, we need to focus on sectoral policies and their local specificities.” (Miruna Troncota, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 68 (5), July, 2016)