The politics of EU eastern enlargement: Evidence from a Heckman selection model

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 17-38

  Plümper, Thomas ^a   Schneider, Christina J ^a   Troeger, Vera E ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KONSTANZ   (Germany)

^b Growth and Public Policy   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 29144478358     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123406000020     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni and Frederico Etro, 'The Political Economy of International Unions' (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 8645, 2001).
2. Frank Schimmelfennig, 'Liberal Community and Enlargement: An Event History Analysis', Journal of European Public Policy, 9 (2002), 598-626, p. 617.
3. James J. Heckman, 'The Common Structure of Statistical Models of Truncation, Sample Selection, and Limited Dependent Variables and a Simple Estimator for Such Models', Annals of Economic and Social Measurement, 5 (1976), 475-92;
4. James J. Heckman, 'Sample Selection Bias as a Specification Error', Econometrica, 47 (1979), 153-61.
5. Patrick Bolton and Gerard Roland, 'The Breakup of Nations: A Political Economy Analysis', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112 (1997), 1057-90;
6. Gerard Roland, 'The Political Economy of Transition', Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16 (2002), 29-50.
7. International Monetary Fund, Direction of Trade Statistics (Washington, D.C.: IMF, various years).
8. Some copyright fees go to Dani Rodrik: 'Saying that trade policy exists because it serves to transfer income to favored groups is a bit like saying Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mt. Everest because he wanted to get some mountain air' (Dani Rodrik, 'Political Economy of Trade Policy', in Gene Grossman and Kenneth Rogoff, eds, Handbook of International Economics, Vol. 3 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1995), pp. 1457-94).
9. Dawn Brancati, 'The Wisdom of Widening: The Enlargement of the EU to Central and Eastern Europe' (unpublished paper, Columbia University, Department of Political Science, 1999);
10. Allessandra Casella and J. S. Feinstein, 'Public Goods in Trade: On the Formation of Markets and Jurisdictions', International Economic Review, 43 (2002), 437-62.
11. Walter Mattli, The Logic of Regional Integration: Europe and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 99.
12. Roland, 'The Political Economy of Transition'.
13. Frank Schimmelfennig, 'The Double Puzzle of EU Enlargement: Liberal Norms, Rhetorical Action, and the Decision to Expand to the East', Arena Working Papers, 99/15 (1999);
14. Frank Schimmelfennig, 'The Community Trap: Liberal Norms, Rhetorical Action, and the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union', International Organization, 55 (2001), 47-80;
15. Schimmelfennig, 'Liberal Community and Enlargement'.
16. Schimmelfennig, 'The Double Puzzle of EU Enlargement'.
17. This also means that we do not intend to draft an alternative to the theories discussed above. In other words: economic and political gains explain the incentive to enlarge the EU. Starting from there, we aim at formulating a more convincing explanation; one that explicitly integrates application and accession as contingent choices in a coherent framework.
18. Walter Mattli and Thomas Plumper, "The Internal Value of External Options: How the EU Shapes the Scope of Regulatory Reforms in Transition Countries', European Union Politics, 5 (2004), 307-30.
19. Schimmelfennig, 'The Double Puzzle of EU Enlargement';
20. Schimmelfennig, 'The Community Trap';
21. Roland, 'The Political Economy of Transition'.
22. Walter Mardi and Thomas Plumper, 'The Demand-Side Politics of EU Enlargement: Democracy and the Application for EU Membership', Journal of European Public Policy, 9 (2002), 550-74.
23. Their model is a simple variant of the common-agency model proposed by Bernheim and Whinston and the version suggested by Grossman and Helpman (Douglas Bernheim, (Bezalel Pheleg) and Michael Whinston, 'Coalition-Proof Nash Equilibria I and II', Journal of Economic Theory, 42 (1987), 1-29);
24. Gene M. Grossman and Elhanan Helpman, Interest Groups and Trade Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
25. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Randolph Siverson, 'War and the Survival of Political Leaders: A Comparative Study of Regime Types and Political Accountability', American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 841-55;
26. Thomas Plümper and Christian W. Martin, 'Democracy, Government Spending, and Economic Growth: A Political-Economic Explanation of the Barro Effect', Public Choice, 117 (2003), 27-50.
27. Alesina, Angeloni and Etro, 'The Political Economy of International Unions'.
28. Mattli and Plumper, 'The Demand-Side Politics of EU Enlargement', p. 550.
29. Kjell Hausken and Matthias Mohr, 'The Value of a Player in N-Person Games', Social Choice and Welfare, 18 (2001), 465-83.
30. In cases where parliamentary parties sought to co-ordinate their position as to increase the likelihood of EU admission, the resulting 'grand coalition' was short-lived, as in Hungary in 2000, where the coalition failed shortly after its establishment.
31. Countries in the first step are Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine. Countries at war and Central Asian countries are excluded.
32. Countries of the second step are the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania.
33. Note that considering country-years as the level of analysis in the second stage generates correlated errors because the EU concluded the accession negotiations with eight out of ten applicants from Central and East European countries simultaneously in December 2002 rather than accepting applicants once they passed a certain threshold level. As a consequence, the standard errors we obtain in the second stage estimation of the Heckman model are probably too large. We investigate and discuss the severity of this error in the robustness tests.
34. For a detailed coding scheme, see European Bank for Reconstruction, Transition Report: Economic Transition in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and the CIS (London: EBRD, various years, 1990-2001).
35. Since the correlation between all the different types of regulation is extremely high, taking the mean does not omit much of the difference between countries. A factor analysis also supports that the variance over all dimensions can be reduced to a single proxy (factor).
36. This variable was originally coded by Mattli and Plumper and is available upon request as is the whole dataset (Mattli and Plumper, 'The Demand-Side Politics of EU Enlargement').
37. All economic control variables are from the World Bank's Development Indicators.
38. The EU publishes regular reports on the progress the candidate countries have made, based on the single chapters; see http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/negotiations/chapters/index.htm.
39. Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, 'The Party Politics of Euroscepticism in EU Member and Candidate States' (Brighton: Sussex European Institute Working Paper, No. 51, 2002). See also http://www.terra.es/ personal2/monolith/home. htm; http://www.parties-and-elections.de/europe.html.
40. Agricultural subsidies to new members will probably be phased-in over a relatively long period of time. Since the conditions are identical for all new members, the total size of agriculture measures the relative stress new members put on the EU's common agricultural policy.
41. Heckman, 'The Common Structure of Statistical Models'.
42. Heckman, 'Sample Selection Bias as a Specification Error'.
43. Mattli and Plumper, 'The Demand-Side Politics of EU Enlargement'
44. ; Schimmelfennig, 'Liberal Community and Enlargement'.
45. We thank an anonymous referee for bringing this issue to our attention.
46. Estimation results will be supplied upon request.
47. Note that multicollinearity has no impact on the coefficients. Even if two or more variables were collinear, the estimated coefficients would remain unbiased. Therefore, our inferences are not hampered by multicollinearity problems.
48. Likelihood ratio tests have shown that we have to deal with overdispersion (α ≠ 0), which means the sample variance is larger than the mean. Consequently, we cannot run a simple Poisson model but have to use a negative binomial regression procedure that allows for overdispersion.
49. These include regulatory quality, level of democracy, the potential power of a president and economical control variables, such as exports of goods and services and the government consumption as a percentage of gross domestic product.
50. it and it should include a constant. The second equation, however, need not include a constant.
51. Mattli and Plumper, "The Demand-Side Politics of EU Enlargement'.