Peace-building, Europeanization and Local Self- Government Empowerment. A Cross-Country Constitutional and Democratization Indices Analysis in the Balkans

The literature on the Balkans’ post-conflict reconstruction and democratization processes is enriched with studies centered either at presenting the post-conflictual political reform, the international organizations’ intervention in domestic affairs and the quality of local self-government, or the democratization process and institutional guarantees of the rule of law, the processes of federal disintegration and government decentralization, or the European enlargement and Europeanization processes. This paper aims at correlating synthetic analyses of the Balkans’ legal systems starting with the constitutions and statistical analyses of democratization indices gathered and calculated by international observers. The comparative analyses will focus on five dimensions – citizens’ voice and public accountability, control of corruption, political stability and absence of violence and /or terrorism, government effectiveness, rule of law and regulatory quality –, applied to threeWestern Balkans states selected according to the European integration status criterion: Member States (Croatia), candidate countries (the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) and potential candidates (Bosnia and Herzegovina).