The meaning of citizen deliberation is not unambiguous: insights from EU deliberative experiments

Caught up in the deliberative wave, European institutions have promoted and implemented a citizen engagement policy since the 2000s. Initially embraced by an elite minority of reformers, citizen engagement can be considered a consensual narrative of EU legitimisation. Below the surface, however, citizen participation/deliberation remains an interesting proxy through which to understand and evaluate power struggles among several political and institutional actors. Notably, not all the actors involved in designing and implementing citizen procedures at the EU level do so for the same reasons and in the same interests. Based on documentary analysis, interviews and the observation of three EU citizen procedures, this article identifies several conceptions of citizen deliberation: the civic conception, the identity-building conception, the neo-managerial conception and the political instrumentalisation conception. The paper compares these conceptions with the existing scholarship on governments’ and political leaders’ rationales for advocating and implementing citizen procedures.