About Reform Track
Reform Track is a research-based platform that tracks, visualizes, and interprets reform processes in European democracies.
Its goal is to bring clarity and structure to how reforms are framed, evaluated, and understood—particularly in the context of EU accession, rule of law, and democratic institutions.
The platform combines systematic data extraction with a strong commitment to transparency. By focusing on how reforms are narrated in official reports, Reform Track helps uncover patterns that are often overlooked—whether rhetorical shifts, policy stagnation, or procedural repetition.
ALIGNED: A Tool for Critical Monitoring
Reform Track hosts ALIGNED — Assessing Legislative Integration & Governance in European Democracies — an open dataset and dashboard project that analyzes European Commission reports through sentence-level content analysis.
💡 What ALIGNED reveals: By focusing on how reforms are described—not just whether they happened—ALIGNED exposes how the European Commission frames progress and pressure in candidate countries. The tool provides users with a transparent, customizable interface to explore reform narratives through time.
ALIGNED is, to the best of our knowledge, the first initiative to analyze European Commission reports sentence by sentence using a systematic coding framework.
In line with the principles of open science, both the methodology and the dataset will be made publicly available to ensure replicability, accountability, and academic transparency.
Who’s behind Reform Track?
Reform Track was initiated by Ognjen Karadzic, a political sociologist and researcher focused on the internationalization of illiberal regimes. The project is part of his ongoing doctoral research, grounded in political sociology and comparative governance. His work explores the dynamic relationship between the European Union and competitive-authoritarian regimes (CARs) during the EU integration process. His work examines how both domestic actors and EU institutions behave in this process.
He previously worked as a researcher and analyst at CRTA – Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, where he contributed to projects on deliberation, media monitoring, electoral integrity, and rule of law. Drawing from both academic inquiry and civil society experience, Ognjen built Reform Track to apply academic rigor to real-world monitoring—transforming complex institutional reporting into accessible, data-driven insights for researchers, civil society, and institutional stakeholders such as parliaments, oversight bodies, and international organizations.
This platform is not affiliated with any institution, government, or funding body. It exists because reform deserves to be understood, not just reported on.
If you’d like to collaborate, contribute, or learn more about how Reform Track works, feel free to get in touch.