Energy Policy in Central and Eastern Europe: Examining 14 Years of Social Science Research

Energy has been an important policy area for the countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) ever since they joined the EU. This has also been reflected within the growing academic literature, examining a wide range of energy policy related issues linked to CEE countries. However, this scholarship is scattered and is often being developed in isolation within different social science disciplines like political science, sociology, economy, etc. In most cases, energy policy within CEE is analyzed through a generalized prism of the European integration, without providing a clear interlinkage between different disciplines. Such an absence of systematic insights into the existing research on energy policy within CEE not only limits our knowledge about the region, but also prevents new scholarship to build upon the existing aggregated knowledge, and forces researchers to rely upon the partial intra-disciplinary insights. The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic overview of the existing social science research on energy policy within CEE. The paper covers eleven EU member states from CEE over a period of 14 years (2004-2017). Altogether, almost1200 scholarly articles from different social science disciplines have been analyzed in order to obtain insight into the state-of-the-art. The paper examines general trends of the research on energy policy within CEE (within the framework of the Energy Union), as well as its geographic scope and authors. Both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis are applied.