Designing Democracy is the first systematic and in-depth study of the effects of the EU's democratic conditionality, originally set out in the Copenhagen conditions of 1993, on the new political systems of Central and Eastern Europe. It examines this development up to the accession of new member states in 2004. Using new material drawn from extensive elite interviews in several of these countries as well as in Brussels, the book throws much light on how far the EU enlargement process has really strengthened these new post-Communist democracies following their transitions in the 1990s. Applying an interactive approach to the relationship between Europeanisation and democratisation, the book discusses both the EU's evolving policy of conditionality and the domestic arenas of the candidate countries in a three-dimensional analysis of governance, intermediary actors and the socio-economic arena.