Project description
Exploring the politics of legal advice in eastern Europe
Despite the Council of Europe’s important role in guiding eastern European constitutional reforms, its political impact remains unexamined. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the PLEA project focuses on the activities of the Venice Commission to determine how its recommendations influence constitutional and legislative reforms in different countries. Applying the comparative methodology, the project will investigate both states that can be regarded as success stories for aligning their constitutions to the Council of Europe’s recommendations, such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and states where the cooperation between them was rather conflictual, such as Moldova, Russia and Ukraine. The findings could deepen understanding of constitutional governance and the politics of legal reform in eastern Europe.
Objective
PLEA explores the politics of legal advice-giving by examining the impact of the Council of Europe’s framework on constitutional democracy-making in Eastern Europe. Legal scholars argue the crucial role of the Council of Europe’s specialized expert bodies in democracy-making and fostering constitutional change in Eastern Europe. The Venice Commission (European Commission for Democracy through Law), an institutionalized body of legal expertise, is seen to be ‘guardian of democracy’ and ‘transnational legal order’-maker ensuring the quality of democratic governance in the region. As I argued in a recent op-ed, the practice of constitutional law advice-giving has thoroughly influenced legislative change in Ukraine among other Council of Europe member states. Surprisingly and unlike with the reception of ECtHR (European Court of Human Rights) case law , empirical political studies have not systematically examined cross-country variations in the reception of the Venice Commission decision-making or traced the impacts of its politics of legal advice-giving.
The PLEA project fills the lacuna and offers a framework for operationalizing and measuring the politics of legal advice-giving in the region. The project adopts a comparative analytical lens and couples the analysis of apparent ‘success’ stories of the alignment with Council of Europe-upheld framework of constitutional democracy (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) with country-cases where this relationship has been more complicated or outright problematic (Moldova, Ukraine, Russia) over time. PLEA is innovative in combining thorough data collection with a nuanced analysis of the state-of-play of the politics of legal change. It contributes to empirical political studies, area studies, law and politics scholarships.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology governance
- social sciences political sciences government systems democracy
- social sciences law
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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51005 Tartu
Estonia
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