How Did Political Science Get Democratisation in East-Central Europe So Wrong? The Case of Bulgaria in the 2000s

The quite recent consensus that East-Central Europe had rapidly and successfully consolidated liberal democracy under EU supervision (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005, Ekiert, Kubik & Vachudova 2007, Borzel & Risse 2012) has now been supplanted by a new consensus of the region as a bastion of illiberalism sinking into democratic malaise (Rupnik 2012, Herman 2016, Agh 2016). Taking a forensic approach to both comparative literature on ECE as a whole and country-specific literature on Bulgaria in the 2000s, I argue that two overlapping biases led to the most effusive accounts being given prominence while more equivocal, guarded and critical accounts were marginalised. Both forms of bias were – and arguably remain – endemic in political science. At the region-wide comparative level, a methodological bias favouring rational institutionalism (RI) in many of the most prestigious Europe-focussed empirical political science journals meant that the most visible comparative research tilted strongly towards confirmation of the incentive-based logic of EU leverage and conditionality. At the level of country-specific studies, a philosophical bias favouring a technocratic and economically-loaded conception of liberalism that dovetailed rather too neatly with the political preferences of domestic pro-EU governments meant that ‘country overview’ articles – particularly those commissioned by the Journal of Democracy – served to blunt the critical impetus of numerous in-depth studies lamenting the failures of EU-mandated ‘reforms’ in different policy domains. This appraisal does not lead to a denial of the analytical utility of the toolkit of RI nor for any call to banish philosophical commitments from academic scholarship, but it does serve to highlight the ongoing need for methodological and philosophical pluralism at the top tables of the discipline.