Does European integration facilitate executive aggrandizement?

This paper examines how the European Commission assesses democratic backsliding in candidate countries, arguing that its technocratic understanding of democracy has unintentionally facilitated executive aggrandizement. While the Commission formally monitors adherence to democratic norms, our analysis shows that its evaluations have consistently prioritized administrative efficiency and institutional capacity over participatory and pluralistic aspects of democracy. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, we analyse the full corpus of Commission progress reports from 1998 to 2023 to trace the evolution of the EU’s democracy discourse. The findings reveal that references to bureaucratic performance, civil service reform, and policy implementation vastly outnumber mentions of political participation, or civil society engagement. This technocratic bias, we argue, reflects the Commission’s administrative ethos and has contributed to legitimizing centralized, efficiency-driven governance in candidate states—sometimes at the expense of democratic accountability. The findings shed light on how the EU’s own evaluative practices may inadvertently sustain the very trends of democratic backsliding it seeks to counter.