The European Citizens’ Initiative and Civil Society: Evidence from One Year of Implementation

The EU has designed mechanisms providing a voice to stakeholders in the policy making process in the last 15 years, justified with the notions of good governance, participatory democracy and transparency. All the initiatives taken in the wake of the White Paper of Governance in 2001 have relied on an institutionalised relationship between EU institutions and organised civil society. The European Citizens’ Initiative is expected to move emphasis of participatory arrangements from institutionalised discussion with organisations established in Brussels to the mobilisation of citizens at grassroots level on European affairs. However the regulation of the ECI demands much from organisations to obtain the required threshold of 1 million signatures, which might lead to an expectation that the ECI will be mainly used by organised civil society. However it can be expected that it will be used by different organisations than those usually involved in EU affairs, and in particular those which use low-cost means to bring forward measures. These will include organisations not established in Brussels, and those linked to social movements, and which is likely to result in an escalation policy demands which diverge from the Commission’s agenda. It is also likely to contribute to the pan-European diffusion of debates. In order to test these expectations this paper will analyse both signature collection campaigns carried out between 2003 and 2012 and those carried out in the first year of the ECI (June 2012-June 2013). The paper considers the policy domain, the agenda style (whether it challenges the Commission’s agenda) and the type of promoters. At the date of the proposal, the ECI seems to be attracting a new constituency of organisations and challenging the Commission agenda, which is likely to enhance the contribution of participatory mechanisms to the emergence of a European public sphere.