Ognjen Karadžić is a digital democracy researcher and PhD candidate in political sociology at the University of Belgrade. His doctoral research applies world-systems analysis to EU accession conditionality, using Serbia as a case study. He previously worked as a researcher and analyst at the Center for Research Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) in Belgrade, and as a teaching assistant at the University of Belgrade, where he taught Historical Sociology and the Research Placement course. He is currently Digital Democracy Research Coordinator at Democracy Reporting International (DRI) in Berlin, where his work focuses on coordinated inauthentic behaviour, platform governance, and election-related online communication.
Why ALIGNED exists
Theory and empirics need to coexist. When the theoretical argument for this doctoral research started taking shape, it became clear that data is what distinguishes between creative takes and founded theoretical innovation. To use data for a theoretical argument, it needs to be interpreted. To be interpreted, it needs to be collected. That chain of reasoning is where ALIGNED began.
The theoretical work here may not be of interest to anyone outside the narrow field of EU-Western Balkans relations. But data can be interpreted in numerous ways, and the underlying material, nine years of European Commission evaluations of Serbia’s reform progress, carries meaning well beyond any single theoretical frame. ALIGNED is built to make that material accessible: an objective, replicable, and reproducible approach to analysing EC Progress Reports, with a dashboard that allows scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and interested individuals to access quick, reusable graphs and data.
The starting point is a simple but underappreciated observation: positive speech does not mean positive grades. The European Commission writes in diplomatic language, and diplomatic language has rules. Problems are rarely named directly. Critical assessments arrive wrapped in forward-looking, constructive phrasing. A sentence that sounds like encouragement is often, on close reading, a record of failure. ALIGNED reads these reports sentence by sentence and scores them accordingly.
What this is not
ALIGNED is not a verdict on Serbia’s reform trajectory, and it is not an independent assessment of whether the European Commission’s evaluations are accurate or fair. The scores reflect how the Commission frames progress, not whether that framing is correct. The reports themselves have an ideological function: they are used by governments to claim validation and by oppositions to claim failure, frequently from the same document. ALIGNED helps you see what the text actually says. The interpretation remains yours.
About the project
ALIGNED is a personal project with no institutional affiliation, no conflict of interest, and no external funding. It is developed as part of doctoral research in political sociology and is entirely self-funded. The World-Systems Analysis lens applied in one section of the dashboard reflects the doctoral theoretical framework and should be read as interpretative, not definitive. All other views in the dashboard offer neutral readings that can be understood and used independently of any theoretical position.
The dataset currently covers Serbia’s EC Progress Reports from 2015 to 2023. Future versions will extend coverage to Montenegro, then to all Western Balkan EU candidates, and eventually to all candidate countries. If and when LLM-assisted coding is introduced, full inter-coder reliability testing will be conducted and documented.
Cite this dataset