European Citizenship is, by now, an ubiquitous institutional element of EU polity providing individuals rights to take part in the EU’s political community. Theoretically, European Citizenship substantially challenges the traditional congruence between nationality, territory and political community. While the implementation of supra- and transnational rights related to citizenship in the EU finds the applause of theorists of cosmopolitan and participatory democracy, the impact of those rights on the opportunities emerging at national, transnational and supranational level has seldom been mapped in a comparative manner across EU member states. This paper provides such a systematically mapping for political rights and assesses the institutional opportunity structures that evolves for individuals. Doing so, it detects cross-national variation and differences depending on the legal status of individuals that evolve from the putative unitary framework of EU law. I map different types of individual rights according to its intention in law: participation, accountability and transparency of and in democratic polity. Methodologically, I code each legal provision by EU law that grants individual rights in the aforementioned dimensions and compare its national implementation in terms of scope and inclusiveness of the respective right. Linking the macro development of the institution of European citizenship with the institutional opportunity structures of individuals allows to gauge individual rights in the EU in terms of the opportunities of its addressees. Furthermore, by looking at how different institutional settings evolve from EU law, this paper contributes to the debate on the legitimacy of EU governance detecting varying patterns of inclusion and empowerment within the EU’s political community.
