Is Europe Listening to Us? Successes and Failures of EU Citizen Consultations

How can the European Union engage and connect with the people it aims to represent? What initiatives and schemes have been used to engage EU citizens? To what extent can such procedures be considered a move forward towards a more participative and democratic Europe?

This collection of internationally recognised specialists in European integration and innovative democratic practices seek to answer these key questions, explore European citizens’ thoughts and opinions about the EU and evaluate the governing elite’s attempts to engage with the public. It offers critical analysis of EU justifications and strategies for implementing Deliberative Citizens Involvement Projects and focuses on some of the major participative experiences trialled and implemented by EU institutions. By comparing these different attempts to increase and bolster the participation of EU citizens and evaluating their impact the book offers material on the civic involvement of EU citizens and the legitimacy of the EU decision making process.

Contents:
Part I Contextual and Theoretical Framework: Europe’s new communication policy and the introduction of transnational deliberative citizens’ involvement projects, Mundo Yang
+ European governance and the deliberative challenge, Dawid Friedrich

Part II Case Studies:
+ European citizens' consultation: a large consultation on a vague topic, Raphaël Kies, Monique Leyenaar and Kees Niemöller
+ Toward a European public sphere - the EuroPolis project, Pierangelo Isernia, James Fishkin, Jürg Steiner and Danilo Di Mauro
+ Talking with the wind? Discussion on the quality of deliberation in the Ideal-EU project, Julien Talpin and Laurence Monnoyer-Smith
+ Combining inclusion with impact on the decision? The Commission’s online consultation on the European Citizens’ Initiative, Romain Badouard
+ The deliberative quality of the Agora, Léa Roger

Part III Comparative Analyses:
+ Designing democratic innovations at the European level: lessons from the experiments, Graham Smith
+ A comparison of deliberative designs and policy impact in the EU and across the globe, John Gasti