Institutional Resilience and Democratic Sustainability in Post-Transition Europe: Lessons from Romania and Central-Eastern Europe

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes institutional resilience as a core condition of democratic sustainability in post-transition Europe. Building on neo-institutionalist approaches and recent scholarship on democratic resilience, we argue that democracies endure when three capacities align: policy coherence, procedural legitimacy, and civic/monitory participation. Using a comparative, theory-guided design, we analyze Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia (2007–2025), triangulating V-Dem/Eurostat indicators with documentary evidence (EU Rule of Law reports, CEPEJ) and interpretive analysis. Romania illustrates “reactive resilience” anchored in judicial independence and civic vigilance; Slovakia shows “restorative resilience” after corruption scandals; Poland exhibits “societal compensatory resilience,” where civic mobilization offsets institutional regression; Hungary demonstrates “instrumental resilience without democracy,” combining administrative capacity with normative decay. We integrate these findings into a three-dimensional model—institutional, normative, and communicative—showing how feedback loops convert crisis into learning. The paper concludes that sustainable democracy depends less on constitutional design alone and more on the institutionalization of learning: redundant veto points, impartial procedures that generate trust, and a monitory public sphere that sustains continuous accountability. For EU policy, the shift from conditionality to capacity (e.g., RRF) can foster endogenous resilience when supranational norms are domestically internalized rather than externally imposed.