Holesch, Adam, 1977-Portela, Clara2024-10-212024-10-212024Holesch A, Portela C. Talks? The effectiveness of sanctions in the ‘rule of law’ conflict in the European Union. J Common Mark Stud. 2024 Oct 16. DOI: 10.1111/jcms.136930021-9886http://hdl.handle.net/10230/68273Data de publicació electrònica: 16-10-2024The European Union (EU) responded to democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland by implementing a sanctions toolbox, which includes the Article 7 Treaty on European Union (TEU) mechanism, infringement procedures and funding conditionality. Whilst the Article 7 TEU procedure has been extensively studies and found to be ineffective, the efficacy of infringement procedures and the recently introduced funding conditionality – comprising the Conditionality Regulation, the Recovery and Resilience Facility and the Common Provisions Regulation – remains less understood. Drawing on the sanctions scholarship, we identify two central determinants for sanction effectiveness: the credibility of sanctions imposition and their economic costs. We then explore how they influence the effectiveness of the sanction mechanisms introduced by the EU by testing four hypotheses. The findings indicate that both infringement procedures and funding conditionality are only partially effective. This comparative analysis enhances our understanding of coercive mechanisms that can mitigate decline in democratic governance.application/pdfeng© 2024 The Author(s). JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13693Article 7 TEUConditionalityHungaryPolandRule of lawinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess