Why the European Parliament Lacks Motivation to Enhance Citizen Participation

In recent years, democratic innovations such as mini-publics, citizens’ assemblies, and various deliberative committees have proliferated, coupling representative and participatory democracy as a response to the dissatisfaction with representative features of democracy (Coleman and Moss, 2023). At the EU level, a significant milestone was the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE). This initiative brought together decision-makers, citizens, and other stakeholders to jointly deliberate on EU policies. The European Parliament (EP) was one of the main proponents of the initiative, hosting the CoFoE (Borońska-Hryniewiecka and Kinski, 2024). Yet, after its conclusion, it was the European Commission (EC) that institutionalized deliberative tools in policymaking through the establishment of European Citizens’ Panels. This article examines this puzzle, focusing on the lost participatory momentum within the EP and asking what obstacles prevent it from bridging the gap between citizens and parliament through deliberative instruments. To explain the EP’s limited engagement, the article employs historical and sociological institutionalism. Drawing on elite interviews with EP staff, complemented by an analysis of official documents and relevant literature, this research argues that both instrumental and normative motivations behind the EP’s efforts to strengthen citizen participation are overshadowed by the logic of so-called “trickle-down democracy” (Beetz, Pittoors and Wolfs, 2025). This logic—observed within the institutional culture and practices of the EP—reflects a historically socialized assumption that more democracy “at the top” will automatically filter down to citizens “at the bottom” As a result, not only national parliaments but also citizens themselves remain sidelined within this leitmotif, leaving participatory instruments in the technocratic and depoliticized hands of the European Commission.