Monetary regimes,economic stability,and EU accession: Comparing Bulgaria and Romania

This paper traces the origins of the different monetary regimes adopted in Bulgaria and Romania in 1996–97 and examines their performance during the EU accession. The findings indicate that the constraints of the currency board in Bulgaria shifted economic activity towards the private sector, while the discretionary policies in Romania turned public finances into both a contributor and a response mechanism to economic imbalances. While the prospects of EU accession initially enhanced the performance of the monetary anchors, the implicit insurance of EU membership increased moral hazard and led to a rapid rise in private and public debt. The paper also explores the historical parallels between the monetary regimes of Bulgaria and Romania in 1996–97 and 1925–1940.     

Killings in Context: an Analysis of the News Framing of Femicide

While attacks against members of the LGBT community are increasingly covered as hate crimes and are widely viewed as a form of repression, attacks on women are almost never covered as violations of human rights. We propose that until violence against women is recognized as a form of repression and a threat to the physical security of women, we cannot expect much to be done to prevent it. We posit that policies aimed at preventing violence against women are unlikely to come about unless this abstract concept is connected, through a connection frame, to concrete crimes against women. We conducted a framing analysis of news coverage of all confirmed femicides in Massachusetts in 2013 and find that while journalists have the potential to draw these connection frames, they seldom put these killings in the context of violations of women’s rights.     

Success in slow motion: The Europeanization of Romanian child protection policy

This paper analyzes the influence of the European Union (EU) through a qualitative case study of child protection policy in Romania. This is a particularly tough case for the growing “Europeanization” literature. Prior research has called attention to several factors that promote Europeanization, including the presence of a pro-reform domestic coalition, the clarity and consistency of the EU’s own legislative targets, a state’s own prior involvement in the setting of European standards, a strong consensus among EU member states backing the European position, and strong non-European support for EU initiatives. According to these propositions, Romanian child protection seemed to provide a worst case scenario for Europeanization, as initially none of these conditions held. And yet the paper shows that substantial Europeanization occurred anyway. We argue that the EU experienced a very slow start with Romania but that it cultivated an opposition that responded to EU initiatives when that opposition took power. Moreover, the EU found three “workarounds” to the obstacles just noted: it asserted legislative targets it did not possess itself, invented new policy tools, and drew protection for its most controversial policy from another international organization, the ECHR. Our central theoretical claim is that external pressure requires internal accommodation in order to have lasting effects. The claim has important implications for the diffusion and conditionality debates.