The EU's official approach to the rule of law and democracy credentials in the enlargement policy: A case study on turkey between 1998 and 2016

This thesis focuses on the research question of that how the European Union (EU) constitutes its official approach on the rule of law and democracy credentials of a candidate country. As emphasizing the EU's official approach in the research question; the primary data is determined as the Progress Reports which are issued for evaluation of candidate's performance on accession criteria annually by the European Commission. The case of Turkey's candidacy process, with its long history and delivering the Progress Reports since 1998, provides a comprehensive and consistent data to understand the EU's approach on the rule of law and democracy credentials in the accession conditionality. In the current literature, there is no an overall study as an academic evaluation of the Progress Reports for Turkey, regarding the analysis of the EU's approaches on democracy and the rule of law credentials in the political conditionality. In this respect, the related content for the rule of law and democracy parameters in the Progress Reports for Turkey between 1998 and 2016 are analyzed with the dominant literature to explain the EU approaches on these credentials. The overall findings are that the EU sets different approaches to the rule of law and democracy credentials based on the related components and reasoning in the framework of the rationalist and constructivist institutionalist paradigms.