Democratic reforms, or lack thereof, in countries addressed by the European Union’s (EU’s) Eastern Partnership initiative (EaP) have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Yet many studies approach these countries’ political and policy developments through the lens of external actors’ (especially the EU and Russia’s) engagements. While accounting for international influences, this article lends agency to the domestic actors by scrutinizing the antidiscrimination reform process in Moldova, one of the EaP countries with closer relations to the EU, against the background of their negotiations. In doing so, the article explains the outcome of the reform and makes a case for applying Robert Putnam’s (1988) Two-Level-Game approach to an analysis of a controversial reform process surrounded by international and domestic pressures in a nonconsolidated democracy. In addition to its empirical contribution, the article seeks to advance the applicability boundaries of the Two-Level-Game theory beyond classical Foreign Policy Analysis in a democratic context and enhance the scholarly debate on the external–domestic interplay in policy change and norm adoption.

在欧盟（EU）的“东方伙伴计划”（EaP）所针对的国家中，民主改革或缺乏民主改革引起了学术界的极大关注。然而，许多研究通过外部参与者（尤其是欧盟和俄罗斯）的参与来探讨这些国家的政治和政策发展。在考虑国际影响的同时，本文通过在谈判的背景下仔细研究摩尔多瓦的反歧视改革进程，将其借给国内参与者，摩尔多瓦是与欧盟关系更紧密的欧洲，中东和非洲国家之一。在这样做，这篇文章解释了改革的结果，并为将罗伯特·普特南（Robert Putnam）（1988）的“两层博弈”方法应用到一个有争议的改革过程的分析中提供了理由，该过程被一个非合并民主制的国际和国内压力所包围。除了其经验贡献外，本文还试图在民主的背景下超越传统的外交政策分析来超越两级博弈理论的适用范围，并加强关于政策变革和规范采用中的内在相互作用的学术性辩论。