Who Pays for Entering Europe? Sectoral Politics and European Union Accession

Abstract

This article analyses the effects of sectoral political lobbies on the Romanian and Bulgarian governments' efforts to reform their economies for European Union accession. The progress of restructuring and retrenchment is crucially dependent on the coincidence of which groups are adversely affected by accession-motivated reforms, and which groups are sufficiently mobilised at the domestic level to block international-level deals. In turn, the political power of the agricultural and industrial sectors is determined by workplace-level and national-level variables. At the workplace level, it is easier to organise people in a small number of large firms than a large number of small firms, and to organise employees in public-owned or insider-privatised enterprises compared to other types. At the national level, monopolistic sectoral associations whose members have no exit option may be bought off by government side payments to the leadership, while representation that is overly fragmented will be ineffectual.