How Conditionality Shapes Coercion: Explaining Varieties of Protest Response in Serbia and Georgia

How does European integration impact how candidate countries respond to domestic dissent? Serbia and Georgia are both undergoing a period of sharp autocratization in the wake of prolonged public protest. Despite facing similar threats to regime stability, their coercive responses to these threats have diverged (Davenport 2007, Gerschewski 2013). The Serbian ruling party has opted to outsource violence towards protest participants and civic activists to informal networks of “hooligans,” ultranationalists, and paramilitary. The Georgian government, however, has combined incitement of street violence with institutionalized forms of state repression. To explain this variation, this paper uses comparative process tracing to analyze human rights reports, traditional and social media, and interview data over the last two years. It tests national-level factors like elite cohesion and state capacity (della Porta 1995, Svolik 2012) against supra-national factors like Western linkages and international response (Levitsky & Way 2010). By tracing how external conditionality interacts with domestic patronage structures, I argue that long-winded EU conditionality in Serbia has helped entrench informal coercive practices under a single, centralized party apparatus. In Georgia, a recent candidate country “in name only” that is also rife with inter-elite conflict, the ruling party remains more willing, and therefore more likely, to turn to legal tools of coercion and repression. Scant research has explored how both the prevalence and form of state-linked violence in the EU’s neighborhood is shaped by conditionality, making this paper a unique contribution to the study of integration challenges for competitive authoritarian regimes in democratic decline.