The role of the European Union in the state building of Kosovo: an institutional development perspective using Ward’s hierarchical clustering

This article examines the European Union's contribution to institutional development in Kosovo between 2008 and 2024. It combines a review of EU state-building logic, normative power and conditionality with Ward's hierarchical clustering of standardized governance indicators from the Worldwide Governance Indicators, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Freedom House, the Corruption Perceptions Index and European Commission enlargement reports. Three clustering exercises compare six Western Balkan polities in 2008, 2014 and 2024, their multi-source institutional profiles in 2024, and Kosovo's 2008–2024 sectoral trajectories, using pooled-scale standardization for valid longitudinal comparison. Results show Kosovo moving from the weaker regional sub-group in 2008–2014 into the four-country middle-reformer cluster by 2024, with its distance to the middle group falling from 3.16 to 2.45 and to the leading reformer from 4.61 to 3.48, while its distance to Bosnia and Herzegovina rose from 2.06 to 3.31. The solution is highly stable (cophenetic r = 0.860; bootstrap Jaccard 0.83–1.00) across alternative linkage-distance and indicator-overlap tests. Technical-administrative domains advance while rule of law, the judiciary, anti-corruption and public administration stagnate. These patterns are consistent with EU-supported institution-building without full state consolidation, reported as descriptive convergence rather than causal evidence.