In academic and public debates, external actors have been considered to promote their rules most effectively in third countries in cases of high and asymmetric interdependence. Hence, high interdependence of European Neighborhood Countries (ENC) with Russia has been discussed as a major...

The EU’s Eastern Enlargement is considered to be one of the (few) successful experiments of promoting good – both effective and legitimate – governance. By contrast, the EU’s transformative power appears to be weak or non-existent vis-à-vis its (old) neighbors in the South and its (new)...

Why is regulatory convergence towards EU rules more successful in some policy fields than in others within one EU neighboring country? By comparing Ukraine’s convergence towards EU rules in the field of shareholders’ rights and technical standards, I challenge prominent explanations for...

Despite theoretical and methodological progress in what is now coined as the third generation of diffusion studies, explicitly dealing with the causal mechanisms underlying diffusion processes and comparatively analyzing them is only of recent date. As a matter of fact, diffusion research has...