In the last years, European Union has developed a set of new instruments in order to associate ordinary citizens to European policies. Some important experiments have taken place, most notably Ideal-EU project, the Europolis project and the European Citizens Consultation project. In these democratic experiments, random selection has been important, together with a carefully organized deliberation of these mini-publics. It seems that deliberative democracy, in the form it is been developed theoretically and practically in the last few decades, now enters European Union governance. However, the impact of these experiments on actual policies has been very small. The relation of these mini-publics to the wider public has not been a central issue. The potential articulation between this form of citizen participation and NGOs’ participation has not been discussed. Relying on several evaluations of these experiments (both official, for the EU, and informal, in the framework of a qualitative research project on participatory democracy); the paper will try to assess the past experiments: deliberative quality, policy outputs, and democratic outputs. It will also propose a conceptual frame in order to address some challenges of mini-publics at the European scale and to integrate these mini-publics within a broader view of citizen participation.
