The European Citizens' Initiative: A New Online Tool for Democratic Innovation?

The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), implemented in april 2012, is a fairly new tool to provide citizens with the opportunity to influence the European Commission, and by extension the European Union policy. One million European citizens, who are eligible to vote in the European parliamentary elections, can ask the European Commission for a new (legislative) act with regard to the topic of their European Citizens' Initiative. Organisers of an ECI can use two different methods to collect statements of support, i.e. paper or online. The online collection is somewhat innovative on the European level, especially when taking into account the necessary one milllion support statements needed. This novelty naturally poses some challenges, i.e. with regard to the necessary technical requirements for the online system, the actual development of the system, the certification and verifications of both the system and the statements of support, etc. In addition, this new agenda-setting instrument potentially influences the working method of the European Commission when designing new legislation or policy, as well as the entire decision-making procedure on the European level. The European Citizens' Initiative procedure has been in place a little over four years, whereby most initiatives have gathered signatures both online and in paper. First of all, we will be evaluating the procedure, as put forward by the Treaties and the Regulations and deduce possible pitfalls for the proper use of the online or digital software. In order to do so, the analysis will not only comprise of the actual Treaty references and Regulations, but also the background and goals of the ECI. We will also consider the perspectives of the organisers, the European Commission and the national authorities of the member states, guaranteeing a full view of the opportunities and difficulties as well as ascertaining the possible gap between theory and pratice. For the purpose of this research paper, we will additionally examine the initiatives put forward so far. An analysis of the abovementioned data will be complemented with previous studies on the ECI, aimed towards possible recommendations for a proper use on the instrument in the future.