5 Years European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) – Dying Patient or Bright Future Ahead? Empirical Perspectives on the Use and Impact of the ECI

Abstract

Over the last years European Union (EU) institutions and particularly the European Commission (EC) have been concerned with bringing citizens closer to policy debates. To this aim, they sought to widen the depth and breadth of citizen and stakeholder involvement in the policymaking process. Underpinned by reflections on the democratic quality of EU decision-making, these considerations culminated in the establishment of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), an instrument, which addresses citizens directly by allowing one million Europeans to submit a policy proposal to the EC. Being the first transnational tool for agenda setting by citizens, the ECI has been coined a democratic innovation at the EU level. The ECI has attracted vivid academic interest from the outset but scholarship has recently been skeptical about whether the ECI would live up to expectations regarding citizen involvement and policy influence. Crucially, although the ECI’s potential impacts have been the subject of interdisciplinary debates, its actual use and impact remain uncharted territory. Five years after the introduction of the ECI instrument, this panel seeks to fill this gap of knowledge on the basis of theory-driven empirical research. In order to achieve a comprehensive assessment of this instrument, it analyses the ECI from three perspectives: the factors that shape public attitudes towards the ECI (Sergiu Georghina and Anna Kandyla); the impact of the ECI on the public sphere and digital activism (Maximilian Conrad and Elsa Hedling) as well as on the EU’s politicization and legitimacy (Renate Preukschat and Julian Plottka).

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