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they would focus on communicating the results of the negotiation process to citizens more widely. While it
was somewhat frustrating for me to realise that I would be leaving the country with only these impressions
of the initial stages of the process, the only way to deal with this situation is for me to remain in touch with
certain interviewees and to follow up on recent development as my write-up progresses. Nonetheless, I will
need to set a cut-off date that will not correspond to the entry of Serbia into the EU and thus will be able to
discuss only part of the process of interest in my thesis.

The problem in Croatia was the opposite one: in the final stages of the accession process, Croatian CSOs
became strongly mobilised and were able to capitalise very successfully on the EU pressure that built up as
the negotiations drew to a close, managing to place several items on the Commission's agenda and actually
to delay the close of acquis chapter 23 by several months. However, civil society empowerment seems to
have been somewhat reversed since accession: EU actors, including member states, now recognise Croatia
as an equal partner, which means CSOs lost a crucial ally in pressuring state officials to pursue domestic
reforms. The process of differential empowerment, therefore, appears to be non-linear, with a surge around
2011–2012, but a partial reversal since. Again, the question of where to end observations comes to the
forefront, with the cut-off date decisively influencing the assessment of the degree of empowerment CSOs
were able to draw from the accession process.

The problem of protracted processes concerns not the end date, but the beginning of observations: does
the process begin once the first step (i.e. an awareness for accession-related opportunities in CSOs)
becomes manifest? Or should there be a more objective starting point (e.g. the opening of formal accession
negotiations with a candidate country)? In the case of Croatia, CSOs were largely absent in the early and
even intermediary stages of the accession process, but suddenly became mobilised once they realised actual
membership was drawing near and they were not happy with the progress made in the fields of rule of law
and the protection of human rights. The more drawn-out the accession negotiations are – and they tend to
become longer with every new candidate state – the more difficult it is also to relate CSO empowerment to
the ongoing negotiations with the EU. Given a general trend towards democratic transition in those societies
seeking to enter the EU, perhaps an improvement of state–CSO relations would have taken place even in the
absence of a formal EU accession process? This counterfactual is difficult to assess, because even if I had
chosen a country less closely involved with the EU as a sort of control case, such a multitude of factors feeds
into the status of civil society on the domestic scene that it would have been hard to isolate the impact of EU
accession.

In sum, process-tracing appeared to be a very appropriate method to dig deeper into the dynamics of
differential empowerment of domestic actors, particularly when I combined different qualitative methods to fill
evidentiary gaps along the way. At the same time, the method brings with it its own challenges, especially
when used in a comparative case study, as the next section discusses.

The Particular Difficulties of Comparative Process-Tracing

Tracing Processes of Empowerment: Civil Society in European Union

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Accession