Seeking to embed democracy: tracing the substantial evolution of the European Union’s democracy promotion, 2004–2020

Abstract The European Union (EU) is one of the most active promoters of democracy in the world. Stakeholders of democracy promotion frequently criticize the Union for its lack of sensitivity to country-specific contexts. This critique concerns both the concept of democracy and the means through which democratic development ought to be supported from the outside. We examine the validity of this claim by exploring whether the substance of the EU's democracy promotion efforts is sensitive to contextual factors in third countries. We build on Merkel’s (2004) analytical framework of embedded democracy to trace the substance of the Union’s understanding of democracy in 250 country progress reports from 2004 to 2020. We employ qualitative and quantitative content analyses to demonstrate that the EU’s understanding of democracy has evolved over time depending on the contextual situation in individual countries. This article contributes to the literature on EU democracy promotion in third countries, as well as the role of time-and country-varying contextual factors in EU democracy promotion.