ABSTRACT Croatia is regarded as a success story of the EU’s enlargement policy. However, this narrative conflicts with the situation on the ground and with expert surveys, which depict incremental, yet persistent democratic backsliding in recent years. A shift towards illiberal practices, primarily focused on the liberal part of the liberal-democratic nexus, is taking place. This research aims to explore the prevalence and causes for the re-emergence of illiberal practices in Croatia by employing an interpretive method to evidence gathered from media articles and research reports published 2013–2019. The use of illiberal policies by the governing Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in three areas of the political system – the capture of independent agencies, control of the judiciary, and the weakening of independent media – is found to be the driver of democratic backsliding. Causes are found in structural reasons linked to the dominant party. Without either internal power-sharing constraints or external EU conditionality pressure, the HDZ has been able to take advantage of structural weaknesses of the system it built and shaped during the 1990s.

中文翻译：

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结构性弱点和主要政党的作用：自加入欧盟以来克罗地亚的民主倒退

摘要克罗地亚被视为欧盟扩大政策的成功典范。但是，这种叙述与实地局势和专家调查相冲突，后者反映了近年来民主的不断增加而又不断下滑的趋势。正在向着主要以自由民主关系的自由部分为重点的非法惯例转变。这项研究旨在通过采用解释性方法对从2013-2019年出版的媒体文章和研究报告中收集的证据进行研究，以探索克罗地亚的非法行为再次流行的原因。执政的克罗地亚民主联盟（HDZ）在政治体系的三个领域中使用自由政策：占领独立机构，控制司法机构，以及独立媒体的削弱-被发现是民主倒退的驱动力。原因是与统治党有关的结构性原因。在没有内部权力共享约束或欧盟外部条件压力的情况下，HDZ能够利用其在1990年代建造和成形的系统的结构性弱点。