Research on representation within the European Union (EU) often assumes that partisan policy preferences are mediated primarily through the European Parliament, while the European Council and Council of the EU (Council) represent national interests. This assumption obfuscates the potential for divergent policy preferences within Council delegations, the majority of which are coalitions comprised of ideologically diverse parties. Such divergent preferences within national governments provide an incentive for coalition partners to pursue policy outcomes at the EU level that diverge from those of their coalition. This research assesses the existence of such policy shirking by members of the Council utilizing the DEU III dataset, party manifestos, and a new dataset on the partisan characteristics of individual Council members. This analysis provides insights into the factors that affect variations between national positions (as measured by the DEU III) and coalition member preferences (as reflected in party manifestos).

Recent research has documented the European Commission's attention to the preferences of the European public and the other EU institutions when formulating policy proposals. This project demonstrates that such efforts originated with the first Barroso Commission, which addressed public concerns through purposeful coordination with the European Parliament when drafting policy priorities in the Commission’s administrative units. We test for public input during the inter-institutional coordination as early as 2004–2008, using Europarties’ pledges issued during the 2004 EP elections and subsequent Commission policy priorities. Our analyses show that the policy priorities of the Commission overlap with the Europarties’ pledges when 1) the public is critical of European integration, 2) policies are salient to the public, and 3) priority initiatives fall in areas dominated by civil society and NGO groups. We interpret our results as a responsive relationship based on the inter-institutional coordination between the two actors at the agenda-setting stage.

In this article, we review the political developments in Bulgaria since the fall of communism in 1989, including the process of European integration that it underwent. We pay a particular attention to the positions that political parties in the country take with respect to the country’s membership in the European Union (EU). The place of the EU in the profiles of Bulgarian political parties is assessed through quantitative data available from the Manifesto Project. The qualitative discussion of the extent of European Union support within each of the major players in Bulgaria’s party system adds to the quantitative data and provides the details on the specifies of Bulgarian socio-economic and socio-cultural Euroscepticism. We conclude that although Bulgarian political elite continues to have a pro-European orientation, Bulgarian Euroscepticism is already part of the party competition, and it is here to stay.

Utilizing a newly compiled data set, this article demonstrates that some election pledges made by the transnational Europarties are included among the European Commission priorities issued during the pre-legislative stage. The data set consists of 597 promises made by four transnational Europarties during the 2004 and 2009 European Parliament (EP) elections and of 698 subsequent Commission legislative intentions. Focusing on the time periods during the Barroso Presidencies, the article’s findings suggest that (1) decision-making rules in the EP help us understand which transnational pledges are included in Commission priorities and (2) promises by two Europarties, such as the European People’s Party and the European Liberal and Democrat Party, are more likely to be considered by the Commission than those of other Europarties. Our results speak to scholarly debates on the place of the Europarties in the European Union inter-institutional relations and more broadly on the democratic legitimacy of the Union.

Building on the mandate theory of democracy and literature on media coverage of elections, this article theorizes why information regarding party promises that is transmitted through the media could affect the former’s fulfillment. Utilizing a unique data set composed of 2,676 promises issued by 14 legislative parties over a 15-year period in post-communist Bulgaria, the study is among the first to longitudinally analyze the role of media in pledge fulfillment, while controlling for institutional and other explanations. The conclusions demonstrate that media reporting of election promises affects the fulfillment of pledges made by coalition parties, when more than one outlet has printed a promise, and under conditions of strong ideological divisions within the cabinet. Furthermore, the impact of media reporting is greater for pledges that do not otherwise have a high likelihood of being fulfilled.

Focusing on Bulgaria, and covering the 1990–2009 period, this article analyses what factors predict if print media will report election promises made by political parties. The study utilizes two original datasets. One consists of 3083 pledges made by 15 parties ahead of seven elections. The second dataset includes news stories published by six newspapers during each election campaign. The analysis reveals that pledges made by the main political opponents during each election are more likely to be published than those by smaller parties. Pledges related to economic policy are also more likely to be discussed in the news than other types of pledges, although the opposite is true regarding promises related specifically to the country’s economic transition. Finally, in their reporting of pledges, print media do not reflect the salient ideological priorities of political parties.

Why are some parties more likely than others to keep the promises they made during previous election campaigns? This study provides the first large-scale comparative analysis of pledge fulfillment with common definitions. We study the fulfillment of over 20,000 pledges made in 57 election campaigns in 12 countries, and our findings challenge the common view of parties as promise breakers. Many parties that enter government executives are highly likely to fulfill their pledges, and significantly more so than parties that do not enter government executives. We explain variation in the fulfillment of governing parties’ pledges by the extent to which parties share power in government. Parties in single-party executives, both with and without legislative majorities, have the highest fulfillment rates. Within coalition governments, the likelihood of pledge fulfillment is highest when the party receives the chief executive post and when another governing party made a similar pledge.

The literature on reform policy fulfillment after the collapse of Communism identifies mandate responsiveness as the weakest aspect of the quality of democracy in Eastern Europe. We build on this research and specify both direct and interaction effects of party promises and voter understanding on policy outcomes. On the empirical level, we develop a measure of citizen comprehension of party positions to analyze this component of the mandate model, previously omitted in much of the scholarship on the topic. Our findings suggest that elements of mandate responsiveness are emerging in the post-communist countries, and that they are present in some policy areas but not in others. The effect of campaign pledges on policy outcomes is contingent on voter awareness of what politicians promise. This knowledge is improved by the distinctiveness in party programs regarding democratization and marketization.

Growing up in Bulgaria during the “transition” years, as a then fifteen-year old, I spent the summer of 1990 queuing up at the neighborhood newsstand waiting for the daily delivery of freshly printed newspapers. Shortages of goods, including food and gasoline, caused long lines in front of many stores, but the crowd waiting at the kiosk was eager to read about the latest political developments, and especially popular were the newspapers published by the newly established opposition parties. While there was no scarcity of political news via television and radio, there was always something special about the print media, much of which, including entertainment weeklies, were such a novelty. Twenty or so years later, I spent another summer among newspapers, in the archives of the National Library in Sofia, poring through the pages and—with no digitization of archives—collecting photographs of news articles published before each of the national legislative elections since 1990. Much has changed in the media environment since then, yet the study of media in post-communist societies and especially its relations to voters, parties, and politics in general is still in its infancy.

This research focuses on the inquiries into alleged maladministration by EU institutions completed by the Office of the European Ombudsman (EO) during the period 1996–2012, seeking to highlight the ways in which the Ombudsman advances democracy in the European Union (EU). The article analyses the content of an original dataset consisting of 515 critical remarks and 113 follow-up inquiries issued by the EO. The study shows that concerns about transparency and accountability dominate citizens’ complaints to the Ombudsman. Further, the analysis concludes that, when EU institutions were subject to critical remarks, in the majority of instances they adopted the EO's recommendation to increase the transparency and/or accountability of their practices. The EO's impact is observable both during the inquiry process and after it issues critical remarks. The article links these conclusions to a broader discussion of the democratic dilemmas in the EU.

Center-right parties in government in Romania and Bulgaria navigated the economic downturns associated with the Great Recession (2008-12), and introduced austerity policies, yet had different electoral fates. While in Romania, the Democratic Liberal Party experienced a dramatic loss at the December 2012 elections, in Bulgaria, the Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria topped the May 2013 vote. In this article, we analyze these divergent outcomes, taking into account institutional configurations, strength of governing parties, and economic conditions. We argue that the electoral effects of harsh economic policies are conditioned by differences in the institutional aspect of governmental “clarity of responsibility” during the peaks of the recession. These differences in institutional clarity become then key factors in understanding the electoral fates of the center-right parties in these governments.

In the last 18 months, voters in Bulgaria went to the polls three times—at two national and one European Parliament (EP) elections. The national legislative elections on October 5, 2014, sent eight parties/coalitions to the National Assembly, making it the most fragmented legislature in the country's post-Communist democratic history. Four formations representing over a quarter of the vote share (Reform Bloc, Patriotic Front, Bulgaria Without Censorship, and Alternative for Bulgarian Renaissance) are newcomers to the legislature. At 51.04%, voter turnout was the lowest for national legislative elections since the Communist collapse. Negotiations for a new government took several weeks, resulting in a two-party minority coalition cabinet between Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) and the Reformist Bloc (RB). Two other parties—Alternative for Bulgarian Renaissance (ABV) and Patriotic Front (PF)— voted for the government during the investiture vote and pledged to continue to support it without signing the coalition agreement.

This paper begins to address the scholarly and data gaps in discussing post-communist social policy arrangements in the context of other European ‘models.’ It does so by proposing an approach for distinguishing among welfare regimes that allows for more detailed comparisons. The goal is not to dismiss existing typologies and classifications, developed mostly from the study of Western democracies, but to go beyond them and to help think of ways to capture the diversity of social policy arrangements both within and between ‘typical’ welfare models in ways that allow for the newer European democracies to be more easily included in the comparison. In particular, this strategy for comparison focuses on two dimensions of social policy : who pays for it, and how are benefits allocated. These two aspects reflect notions of solidarity, personal vs. shared responsibilities, types of societal divisions, and how the latter might be perpetuated by social policy. The paper starts with a condensed overview the numerous ways in which scholars have classified and categorized welfare regimes since the end of World War II. This overview is far from comprehensive but serves to highlight some of the challenges in creating welfare comparisons and in distinguishing among welfare states.

Although election news framing is a burgeoning area of research, empirical studies of what factors influence frame building remain rare, especially in non-Western countries. This study investigates the use of the strategic game frame and the relationship between that frame and system-level and organizational-level factors. The analysis focuses on the coverage of campaign news in six elite Bulgarian newspapers between 1990 and 2009. Results show that the type of electoral system, number of parties in government, and newspaper specialization are significant predictors of game frame use. The results are discussed in relation to framing research in Western Europe and the United States.

This study examines the nature of election promises made by political parties in Bulgaria during the 1997 and 2001 elections, and evaluates the factors that determine pledge fulfilment. The seven parties that took part in these elections made 792 pledges and fulfilled an average of 60% of them. A combination of institutional characteristics, i.e. size of the party, the nature of the pledges, as well as the agreement between pledges made by different parties, explains the probability of fulfilment. Election promises related to European Union accession are also more likely to be fulfilled than other types of pledges.

The 12 May 2013 legislative elections in Bulgaria were precipitated by Prime Minister Boyko Borisov's resignation in February of that year, and took place in the midst of wiretapping scandals and a pre-election discovery of (possibly illegally) overprinted ballots. The elections produced no clear winners, but marked several firsts in Bulgaria's post-communist democratic experience. The turnout was the lowest ever, with nearly half of the electorate staying home and not casting a vote. The outgoing incumbent captured the biggest share of the votes for the first time since competitive multiparty elections were re-introduced in 1990. And, in another first (at least since 2001), no new parties burst onto the political scene. The outcome was a minority coalition government between the Socialist-dominated Coalition for Bulgaria and the Turkish minority Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS). The fact that this coalition enjoyed tacit but active support by Ataka led to the further legitimization of that radical nationalist party and illustrated its ascent to the position of kingmaker in Bulgarian politics.

Although the importance of news sources is widely acknowledged in journalism and political communication, few studies have examined source use in election news reporting in Bulgaria. Based on a content analysis of the two national dailies with the highest circulation, the present study demonstrates that domestic politicians vastly outnumber other types of sources. In addition, election news articles rarely incorporate more than one news source, thus limiting the diversity of opinions in the press. Such coverage may potentially lead to a narrowing of the range of discussion about political issues and give national political elites the power to define the issues for the public.

This study analyzes the role of media type, political institutions and type of news on the use of episodic, thematic, economic consequences, human interest and conflict frames when reporting economic news during seven elections in Bulgaria for the period 1990–2009. Analyzing 543 news stories from six newspapers, the authors find that thematic and economic consequences framing are determined both by the type of economic policy that is reported and by the type of newspaper that is publishing the story. The frequency of human interest framing is also affected by the kind of economic news that is the focus of the news story as well as partially by the broader political environment; such framing is also used more frequently in stories reporting highly contentious economic issues.

Thirty years after Bulgaria’s democratic breakthrough, this book provides a “balance sheet” of the country’s democratic institutions through a number of interdisciplinary contributions. The volume is organized around three themes—democratic institutions, civil society, and European Union (EU) processes—and examines such topics such as voting, political parties, populism, media, civil society organizations, identity, and the rule of law. While the contributors argue that Bulgaria’s democracy is successful in terms of the procedural norms of democracy, civic participation, and compliance with EU rules, they also identify serious problem areas. Bulgaria’s democratic institutions struggle with obstacles such as populist Euroscepticism, political elitism, corruption, and a lack of political accountability, though this volume fully acknowledges the historical development of Bulgarian democracy, including its achievements and continuing setbacks.

Kostadinova, Petia and Robert Thomson. 2020. "Parties in Government" in Costello, Rory and Neil Robinson, eds. Comparative European Politics: Distinctive Democracies, Common Challenges. Oxford University Press.

Kostadinova, Petia. 2020. "Representation Trends in Pledge Making: Do Election Promises Reflect Distinctions between Political Parties in Bulgaria?" in Engelbrekt, Kjell and Petia Kostadinova, eds. Bulgaria's Democratic Institutions at Thirty: A Balance Sheet. Lexington Press.

Kostadinova, Petia. 2020. "Thirty Years in Bulgarian Democracy: Lessons (Partly) Learned" in Engelbrekt, Kjell and Petia Kostadinova, eds. Bulgaria's Democratic Institutions at Thirty: A Balance Sheet. Lexington Press.

Despite the long history of the study of mandate democracy, relatively little is known about its application to newer post-communist democracies. Especially lacking are studies incorporating the role of voters in the mandate attribution process. In this case, we describe our research applying voter understanding of party positions to mandate theory. We focus on the challenges we experienced in collecting data and constructing measures that we used to test the theoretical propositions in our study. In particular, we highlight an original measure of Voter Understanding (of party positions) that we developed for this project but which can be applied in other relevant research too. We also discuss decisions we made with respect to our dependent variables and the method of analysis. We conclude with a call for more original data collection in the region.

Kostadinova, Petia. 2019. "Bulgaria" in Naurin, Elin, Terry Royed and Robert Thomson, eds. The Fulfillment of Election Pledges: Campaign Promises and Government Actions in Twelve Democracies.

The chapter is organized as follows. The next section briefly summarizes the social policy aspects of the Lisbon Strategy and the three areas in which old-age pension reforms are conducted, discussing why old-age pensions are an appropriate focus for this study. In doing so the section highlights the linkages between the Lisbon Strategy and social policy reforms undertaken as a response to it. The following section presents a theoretical framework of the factors that affect member states’ responses to the Lisbon Strategy. Following the research design section, the paper then compares general old-age pension reforms in the 27 member states as well as policy measures introduced in each of the three areas central to the Lisbon objectives: adequacy, sustainability and modernization. The analysis section reveals that government capacity to implement policy reforms is the best predictor for pension reform introduction. Effective government bureaucracy positively and consistently affects pension system overhaul, as well as the introduction of measures improving the adequacy and sustainability of pensions. Adequacy reforms are also facilitated by fewer parties in government, while modernization measures are less likely when right-wing parties are in power. Regarding the factors that affect the need for pension reform among the EU member states, economic conditions have a weak impact, affecting only one reform component. More specifically, the likelihood of adequacy measures introduction is reduced when the income differences between pensioners and the working population are smaller. Finally, the analysis shows that the new member states (NMS), ten of which are post-communist democracies, are much more likely to introduce pension system overhauls, as well as sustainability reforms, than are the EU-15.

Discusses different definitions of globalization as relevant to post-communist politics.