Although the “activism of an elite forum, of political and administrative actors”(Saurugger 2010, pág.471) in the making of this article has been acknowledged, the paper points out the decisive role of a coalition of civil society actors in creating the participatory democracy frame before the Convention. Tracing the debate back to 1997 and to different consultation processes preceding the Convention (2000, 2001, 2002) it suggests that article 47 legitimated and codified existing consultative practices, with the noticeable exception of the ECI. The noticeable elitism in the making of the participatory democracy frame does not preclude it from contributing to a large pan-European debate on participatory democracy. In order to test whether these “strong publics” debates influenced “general publics”(Eriksen 2007), the paper analyses to which extent Spanish and French civil society organisations active in the Convention engaged in this debate. The conclusion is that although European groups did not participate in the diffusion of this debate towards the general publics, national groups did not hesitate to use and adapt it. This suggests that the Europeanisation of this debate was not a vertical top-down one but rather the result of a horizontal adaptation of the frame by different groups to their purposes. References Eriksen, E.O., 2007. “Conceptualising European public spheres. General, segmented and strong publics”. En J. E. Fossum & P. Schlesinger, eds. The European Union and the Public Sphere. A communicative space in the making? London: Routledge. Saurugger, S., 2010. The social construction of the participatory turn: The emergence of a norm in the European Union. European Journal of Political Research, 49, págs.471–495.
