The RESILIO-ACCESS Monitor

The RESILIO-ACCESS Monitor is an innovative analytical tool designed to assess the strength and adaptability of the rule of law in EU accession countries. The tool covers ten candidate countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Türkiye. Additionally, Türkiye is examined in a separate dedicated case study (due in October 2026).

This designation is without prejudice to positions on status and is line with UNSCR 1244/1999 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence.

The data on Ukraine should be considered in light of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the resulting state of emergency.

A new approach to measuring resilience

The RESILIO-ACCESS project conceptualises rule of law resilience through two complementary dimensions: capacity and performance.

Resilience as capacity focuses on the conditions that enable a system to endure stress without losing its core functions. These conditions extend beyond formal institutions and constitutional frameworks, including legal culture, an active civil society, and unbiased media scrutiny. Together, these elements form both the structural foundations and the broader societal environment in which the rule of law operates. Resilience capacity is made of primary and subsidiary rule of law resources.

Resilience as performance, by contrast, captures the dynamic aspect of resilience. It examines how systems respond in practice when confronted with concrete threats, such as autocratisation attempts by democratically elected leaders. Resilience performance manifests when rule of law capacity is exposed to stressors.

By combining these two perspectives, the Resilience Monitor delivers a holistic assessment of rule of law resilience. It identifies key conditions that support its institutional stability, evaluates how systems respond to different stressors, and reveals structural vulnerabilities of the rule of law.

Methodological note

No original data was collected for the purpose of the project. RESILIO-ACCESS is based on publicly available data for 2024 and historically until 2014, where applicable (e.g., rule of law history). The sources used are the World Justice Project, the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem).

Primary and secondary resources were derived by applying principal component analysis. Rule of law capacity was the predicted value derived from using a within-between random effects model regressing the primary resources on the six subsidiary resource variables plus GDP per capita, population, and year as controls.

Stressors were calculated as the average of the arithmetic and geometric means of the seven variables used to measure threats. The arithmetic mean captures additive breadth across threat dimensions, and the geometric mean captures the compounding effect of co-occurring threats.

How to interpret the results

The RESILIO-ACCESS Monitor transforms data available for selected EU accession candidates to systematically organise them in the form of:

• Scores for different dimensions for rule of law resilience (primary and subsidiary resources as well as stressors) in selected countries;
• Overall rule of law capacity per country, representing the aggregated values for primary and subsidiary resources;
• Performance of rule of law resilience per country as correlations between resources, resilience capacity and stressors;
• Potential change in overall rule of law resilience induced by improving rule of law resources (primary and subsidiary) in selected countries.

All resulting variables (primary and secondary resources, rule of law capacity and stressors) are rescaled to a 0 to 1 scale, where higher values indicate higher capacity and greater stressor presence.

Introducing the new Resilience Monitor

In 2023, based on an extensive database, the first RESILIO Monitor tracked rule of law resilience across EU27.

RESILIO-ACCESS takes this analysis a step further. Built on the interdisciplinary RESILIO-ACCESS model, the new Resilience Monitor offers a new way of understanding how legal, social and institutional systems withstand pressure and respond to emerging threats.

Downloads & sources

RESILIO-ACCESS Monitor Manual

Data Sources Overview RESILIO-ACCESS Monitor

Team & authors:

• Misha Popovikj, Program Director at IDSCS
• Marija Mirchevska, Head of the Centre for Good Governance at IDSCS
• Anamarija Velinovska, Head of the Centre for European Integration at IDSCS
• Marija Dimitrovska, Senior Researcher at IDSCS
• Prof. Dr. Funda Tekin, Director at Institut für Europäische Politik
• York Albrecht, Research Associate at Institut für Europäische Politik
• Dr. Maria Skóra, Research Fellow at Institut für Europäische Politik
• Zoran Nechev, Senior Research Fellow at Institut für Europäische Politik
• Constanze Sendler, Project Assistant at Institut für Europäische Politik

About the RESILIO-ACCESS: Resilience Observatory on the Rule of Law in EU Accession Candidates project: How resilient is the rule of law in the EU enlargement countries? RESILIO-ACCESS uses an interdisciplinary approach to answer this question and identifies how EU enlargement policy can contribute to resilient democratic structures in the region.

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