The effectiveness of the Council of Europe and European Union monitoring mechanisms: domestic factors in implementing institutional guarantees of democracy in Ukraine

Abstract

The article proposes an explanatory model of the effectiveness of the monitoring mechanisms of the Council of Europe and the European Union, considered as instruments of external governance with respect to Ukraine. The relevance of the topic stems from the fact that, after Ukraine acquired EU candidate status, opened accession negotiations and completed the screening of its national legislation against EU law, compliance with the conclusions of monitoring bodies became directly linked to progress toward membership and to access to funding through the Ukraine Facility. The research problem is the paradox of differentiated effectiveness: formally similar mechanisms yield strikingly different returns, and the binding nature of a mechanism does not explain why some conclusions are converted into institutional change while others remain unimplemented. The purpose of the article is to identify the factors that determine the effectiveness of monitoring, that is, its capacity to convert an identified non-compliance into the real implementation of institutional guarantees of democracy. The methodological framework combines the concept of external governance with the external incentives model; the main method is process tracing applied to three contrasting cases selected for maximum variation in the type of leverage: the anti-corruption case (the NABU and SAPO episode of 2025), the judicial case (the selection of Constitutional Court judges), and the case of the execution of European Court of Human Rights judgments. The article builds a model in which effectiveness, as the dependent variable, is explained not by the strength of the external leverage but by the configuration of three domestic factors of the target state: the clarity of the “reward”, the mobilizational capacity of civil society, and the alignment of elites. The comparison of cases reveals a counter-intuitive regularity: as the formal bindingness of the leverage increases, effectiveness does not rise but falls – the strongest, legally binding mechanism produced the lowest effectiveness, whereas material leverage combined with a favourable domestic configuration produced the highest. It is concluded that the external incentive is a necessary but not sufficient condition of implementation; the decisive factor is the domestic configuration of the target state. The scholarly contribution lies in the shift from describing and typologising monitoring mechanisms to an explanatory model of their effectiveness.