Research on political conditionality in the EU’s external relations has gained increasing academic attention during the last two decades. This paper argues, however, that there is a disconnect between the analysis of political conditionality in the fields of foreign policy, trade and development that has obstructed a more comprehensive analysis of the effects of the various conditionality instruments of the EU. Development researchers mainly focus on the EU’s practice of tying aid interventions to political conditions, foreign policy research is most concerned with CFSP sanctions, while most of the literature on the EU’s trade relations has dealt very little with issues of political conditionality. As a consequence, the analysis of the effectiveness of political conditionality has in many instances suffered from the fact that measures of the EU are mostly assessed individually with respect to their specific policy field. Such an approach, however, is increasingly difficult to sustain. Over the last decade, the EU’s aid relationship with many developing countries has lost in importance as many countries reduced their aid dependence. In contrast, other fields of the EU’s external relations such as foreign, trade and investment policy are gaining in importance and could increasingly be used as a potential lever for change. This requires not only to analyse political conditionality more holistically across policy fields but also to attribute potential effects in a country more clearly to a specific conditionality intervention. Against the background of this challenge, the purpose of the paper is twofold: first it provides a structured review on different strands of research and develops a conceptual framework for analyzing different types of political conditionality. In a second step, this conceptual framework is used to generate insights on the effectiveness of such conditionality with regards to different target areas (e.g. democratisation, political and social rights, labour rights)
