Financiación de la inversión

After analysing interview data and relevant documents, we decided to exclude participation of new member states as a condition of effectiveness of the Twinning instrument in Ukraine from further analysis. This was done due to a lack of any apparent relationships either with legal or institutional convergence in respective projects. That showed that, contrary to some scholarly expectations,⁴³ the recent transition experience and the closer cultural ties of some new member states with Ukraine apparently did not materialise in a TG cooperation that is more effective. In a similar fashion, the year of project implementation did not seem to be related with effectiveness and hence also dropped from the empirical analysis.

4. Data and methods

For the empirical analysis, we managed to pool sufficient information on 32 out of 40 Twinning projects implemented in Ukraine between 2007 and 2016. The bulk of primary data came from 45 semi-structured interviews with Twinning participants and experts from Ukraine, the European Commission, and EU member states. We located our respondents through relevant Twinning documentation, open web sources, and a “snowball sampling approach”, using existing connections.⁴⁴ Interviews were conducted in several rounds of fieldwork in Ukraine and the EU between November 2014 and May 2016. For each project, we triangulated the interview data against relevant literature, official documents from EU and Ukrainian governmental websites, Twinning reports and press releases. The eight Twinning projects we could not find data on did not seem to display systematic differences with the Twinning projects for which we had sufficient data.

40 Akulenko, “Initial Results of the Twinning Instrument Implementation in Ukraine: Problems and Solutions.”

41 Int. 40 with Ukrainian civil servant, 21 April 2016.

42 Int. 37 with Ukrainian civil servant, 20 April 2016; Int. 40 with Ukrainian civil servant, 21 April 2016.

43 Petrova, “The New Role of Central and Eastern Europe in International Democracy Support”; Pospieszna, Democracy Assistance from the Third Wave: Polish Engagement in Belarus and Ukraine.

44 Burnham et al., Research Methods in Politics.

In the process of the empirical analysis, legal and institutional convergence are coded as two independent outcomes of Twinning effectiveness. In assessing the effectiveness of each Twinning project, we take into consideration all project components and their subsequent impact on the beneficiary country and administration until up to two years after project completion. This period was arbitrarily selected in order to capture the procedural or other delays associated with adoption and implementation of specific policy solutions of Twinning. We assume that project-relevant changes that took place after the period of two years cannot be traced back to the project or are not relevant anymore. Therefore, a Twinning project is considered effective (1), or successful, if it has succeeded in triggering either legal or institutional convergence in the beneficiary institution or policy sector within the given period of time. If no such legal or institutional convergence occurred, the project is considered ineffective (0). With this time-span, we also included more recent projects (which have not passed the two-year threshold yet), as they may also show interesting dynamics, though some of them may necessitate more time to trigger legal or institutional convergence.

As it was nearly impossible to trace all Twinning project components (which may be five or more) several years down the line, we picked out only the most important ones as seen from original Twinning documents and interviewees’

opinions. That task was made easier, because usually only a limited number of initial project intentions ended up making an impact and that the interviewees could readily recollect. It is also important to note here that we do not claim that Twinning projects will be exclusively responsible for a particular change that we will find in the legal or institutional landscape of Ukraine and that happens to relate to a particular Twinning project. Instead, legal and institutional convergence should be understood as a product of broader political and administrative processes in a specific policy area, of which Twinning is only a part, albeit an important one.

As regards the conditions behind legal and institutional convergence, they were also coded on a dichotomous scale as 0 (no, mostly no, or low) and 1 (yes, high, or mostly high). The process of operationalisation and dichotomisation proceeded with close reference to the scholarly literature, interview data, and relevant official documents for each project analysed (Table 10, sources behind the operationalisation of outcomes and conditions are listed in Table 24 in the appendix, p. 194). In order to mitigate possible measurement error and preference bias, we also triangulated our measurements with several sources.⁴⁵

45 Simon Hug, “Qualitative Comparative Analysis: How Inductive Use and Measurement Error Lead to Problematic Inference,” Political Analysis 21, no. 2 (2013): 252–65.

Table 10. Operationalisation of conditions behind Twinning effectiveness

CONDITION CATEGORIES

Sector

politicisation 0 {polit} – Policy area or institution involved in the project was relatively isolated from political and commercial conflict of interest

1 {POLIT} – Policy area or institution involved in the project was susceptible to political or commercial conflict of interest

EU sectoral

conditionality 0 {cond} – EU placed limited emphasis on the country’s approximation in a given policy area, as judged by respective references in EU-Ukraine Association Agreement or visa liberalisation roadmap

1 {COND} – EU placed strong emphasis on the country’s approximation in a given policy area, as judged by respective references in EU-Ukraine Association Agreement or visa liberalisation roadmap

Policy fit 0 {fit} – project goals and objectives did not match the current needs and capacities of the beneficiary institution

1 {FIT} – project goals and objectives matched the current needs and capacities of the beneficiary institution

Communication

quality 0 {comun} – Twinning participants reported major interpersonal communication problems throughout the project

1 {COMUN} – Twinning participants reported no major interpersonal communication problems throughout the project

In order to explore which conditions or their combinations lead to effective Twinning projects, we use a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Because QCA assumes multiple conjunctural causation, it successfully mitigates problems peculiar for statistical methods, such as assumptions of multicollinearity and causal symmetry.⁴⁶ In addition, the proponents of QCA over traditional quantitative methods emphasise its capacity to deal with a larger number of factors while staying in close connection with individual cases. Since QCA seeks to maintain an analytical rigour of comparison, its results are more likely to be replicated and generalised for other related phenomena of interest.⁴⁷

The QCA analysis distinguishes between sufficient and necessary conditions or configurations for an outcome to occur. A condition or configuration is considered necessary if it is always present when the outcome is present; otherwise, the outcome cannot occur. In contrast, a condition or configuration is considered sufficient if the outcome always occurs when the condition is present. However, the same outcome may also be a result of other (sufficient) conditions.⁴⁸ Because legal and institutional convergence present as dichotomous outcomes, we are using the

46 Berg-Schlosser et al., “Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as an Approach,” 9.

47 Ibid., 14.

48 Rihoux and Ragin, Configurational Comparative Methods: Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Related Techniques, xix.

crisp-set variant of QCA, or csQCA.⁴⁹ The csQCA generates so-called “truth-tables”, listing configurations of conditions and outcomes, which may be either True (1) or False (0). After the coding of the outcome and conditions was complete, we performed a QCA of our data for necessity and sufficiency with the help of the “Kirq”

application.⁵⁰