Governance Trends among European Union Countries: Is There Institutional Convergence?

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, to review the existing body of knowledge dealing with the questionable convergence of Eastern European countries as a possible consequence of both the transfer of selected Western formal institutions to those countries and the adoption of the acquis communautaire. It is an issue dating back to the beginning of 1990s when the predominant expectation was that successful formal institutions in Western countries would yield the same results in transitional countries. Using the descriptive statistics, we show that this is a misconception and that it is highly unlikely that Mediterranean and CEE countries will catch up with the three leading groups (Liberal, Nordic and Continental countries) in the coming decades. Next, we focused on quantitative analysis of sigma and beta convergence based on governance trends in the EU in the last two decades. The obtained results also demonstrate rather divergent paths, with Liberal, Nordic and Continental countries performing much better than Mediterranean and CEE countries.