The MAXCAP Working Paper No. 18 “Judicial Reform in Turkey and the EU‘s Political Conditionality: (Mis)Fit between Domestic Preferences and EU Demands” by Meltem Müftüler-Baç has been published. The paper investigates the process of judicial reform in Turkey in the last 15 years, with a focus on the reversal of such reforms since 2013. It aims to explore this (mis)fit and the extent to which the EU’s credibility in its membership conditionality mattered in terms of Turkey’s path of reforms. The key proposition in the paper is that the EU’s lack of credibility combined with increased domestic material costs of judicial reforms at home triggered the backsliding and the reversal of judicial reforms in Turkey. It not only sheds light on the interplay of the EU’s credibility and the high domestic costs; the paper’s findings also challenge the emphasis of the literature on EU conditionality and the EU’s role as an external anchor even when accession negotiations stalled as in the Turkish case. The paper is available for download here.
Source: MAXCAP
