The overall success of the European Union (EU) in making Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) comply with its conditions for membership has led some scholars and policy makers to consider the EU the principal driver of political reforms in post-socialist countries that have applied for membership. Similarly, the Economic Monetary Union (EMU) is often causally associated with the process of political and economic reforms that took place in Western Europe in the 1990s. Nonetheless, despite the academic enthusiasm and the political rhetoric, the causal impact of the EU on the process of institutional reforms in the Eastern and Western has not been established. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that formal institutional change, namely EU-pushed legislated reforms, are not always supported by behavioral change and tend to be either contested or ignored in the implementation phase. These empirical results raise very interesting questions about the process of Eu-ropeanization and about the more general question of real, as opposed to formal only, institutional change in a context in which the demand for change is coming from the outside. This thesis aims to answer two such questions: first, how and to what extent has the EU causally influenced domestic institutional change in Hungary and Italy; second, whether institutional change pushed by the EU has been real, that is, resulted in long-lasting changes in the political behavior of domestic actors. This thesis focuses on two aspects of administrative reforms, the depoliticization of the senior civil service and the devolution of politica power from the center to the periphery. In general, the EU has no formal competence over member states' public administrations. However, in its criteria for membership, the EU has required the eastern candidate countries to develop administrative structures necessary for the adoption and implementation of EU laws. Quite differently, in Western Europe, EMU did not explicitly call for the reform of national public administrations. Nonetheless, as the Maastricht convergence criteria focused on fiscal and economic reforms, Italian decision makers considered the reform of national public administrations crucial to reduce government spending and balance the fiscal budget.