| Summary/Abstract |
It is widely argued that the pre-accession process of the Eastern enlargement affected political competition in Central and Eastern Europe. While such claims have been substantiated in general theoretical propositions, there is a lack of theoretically informed research attempting to explain how political competition was affected throughout the region. This article utilises Lijphart’s institutional typology to better understand how pre-accession processes shaped political competition under consensus democracies. The article shows that the consensually designed democracies of Poland and the Czech Republic were able to mitigate the negative impact of the pre-accession process through the rise of Eurosceptic parties.
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