A Brussels Effect on Tirana? The Influence of Albania’s EU Candidacy on Domestic Political Functioning

Albania applied for EU membership in 2009 and was awarded the status of a candidate country in 2014. The accession negotiations begin in 2022, as part of the EU’s Western Balkans enlargement policy. The prospect of EU membership can act as an impetus for countries to proceed with changes and reforms to meet the accession criteria. The EU’s ability to exert an influence on non-member countries and promote the adoption of EU policies and acquis has been referred to as a Brussels effect. The paper examines whether a Brussels effect is empirically traceable in Albania’s domestic political functioning, focusing on two distinct characteristics: clientelism and political corruption. To this effect, two indices of the V-Dem project are used, and a multidimensional scaling (MDS) is adopted to map Albania’s relative position vis-à-vis the EU member states in specific periods, each one representing a qualitative different stage in the EU-Albania relations and their evolution over time. Results reported herein do not point to an empirically traceable Brussels effect in the case of Albania raising doubts for the actual effectiveness of EU’s transformative power.