What made democratic politicians in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) exclude themselves from judiciary governance? Judiciary institutional change is investigated through a study of CEE judiciaries which revealed a complex causal nexus. The classical model of the ‘external incentives’ of EU accession, while explaining a general drive toward institutional revisions, played an otherwise marginal role. An institutional template prevailed, promoted by an elite transnational community of legal professionals whose entrepreneurs were steering the revision of judiciary governance right after 1989. The parliamentarians disempowered by this revision offered no resistance – a ‘veto-player dormancy’ that emerges as pre-conditional to such transnational influences.
