The European Citizens's Initiative - Furthering the EU's Legitimacy?

The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) is the first transnational instrument of citizen-participation and agenda-setting worldwide. Many scholars and think-tanks, the EU institutions as well as stakeholders have emphasized its potential for creating a European public sphere and alleviating the democratic deficit. Such high expectations reflect normative criteria which form a difficult basis for empirical measurement. Tackling this difficulty, the paper sets out to explain the success of initiatives and in doing this, assesses if and how the ECI can be an institutionalized feedback or input mechanism for European citizens, raise awareness for and create a common discourse on European issues and in doing this, further the EU's legitimacy. It starts by providing an overview of the theoretical expectations towards the ECI and argues that by collecting as many signatures as possible, an initiative enhances the chances of meeting these normative expectations in reality. Literature on national/regional forms of citizen participation such as popular initiatives, referendums and plebiscites as well literature on interest group strategies in the EU provide the basis for drawing up a set of expectations about how an ECI can gather a lot of signatures. Information on resource endowment and salience serve as starting points for a typology of initiatives. Departing from that, the paper further discusses very first findings of a survey that has been conducted with representatives of initiatives and draws a preliminary conclusion about the factors influencing an initiative's success.