In this article the question whether the European's Citizens' Initiative does foster political engagement with and trust in the European Union will be explored. This will be done by answering the question to what extent it succeeds to involve new groups of citizens in the political community of the EU. In the first section the gap between the representation of civil society as Brussels based and the grassroots groups in the member countries will be described and analyzed. Subsequently the hypothesis will be explored of whether ECI’s produce connections between these two. This will be done by looking into what kind of interest groups have been involved in the 11 ECI’s that were closed before 25 April 2014. In the case the (initiators of the) ECI’s turn out to have drawn grass roots groups into their policy network the hypothesis will be accepted.
