Mapping decision opportunities: Accountability demands in EU rule of law enforcement

The European Union (EU) is based on values of democracy, the rule of law (RoL) and fundamental rights enshrined in Article 2 TEU. The ongoing process of autocratisation in some of its member states reveals the EU’s constrained ability to enforce these values. Since the onset of Hungarian democratic backsliding in 2010, scholarship has examined EU (in)action mainly in terms of institutional, structural and contextual factors. Actor-centred approaches are rare and tend to focus on the European Parliament, the Court of Justice of the EU and civil society as more consistent proponents of RoL enforcement. The literature still lacks a systematic, longitudinal account of who demanded enforcement when and whether such demands shifted EU decisions. This paper takes a novel approach and analyses RoL enforcement through the lens of accountability, introducing the concept of ‘decision opportunities’: externally visible accountability claims directed at EU institutions that demand the initiation or escalation of RoL enforcement. Using English-language newspaper sources, the study compiles an event dataset for 2010–2025 and codes for each case: (i) the demand made of the EU; (ii) the backsliding member state against which the EU is urged to initiate or escalate action; (iii) the EU institution targeted; and (iv) the actor(s) advancing the claim. This analysis systematically maps moments of accountability in EU RoL enforcement over time in nine cases of democratic backsliding – Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. By treating enforcement as a sequence of call-and-response, this approach renders accountability empirically tractable and provides a replicable foundation for studying how Article 2-values are enforced in the European Union.