Guardians of Transnational Representation? Parliamentary Elites and Disillusionment with Citizen Participation in the EU

In response to the “Brussels bubble” metaphor, which highlights the EU’s perceived disconnection from its citizens, the EU has adopted the “citizen turn” to enhance citizen involvement in policymaking. While extensive research exists on what motivates increased citizen participation (Thompson, 2019; Bailly, 2025; Kindermann, 2025), this paper focuses on the reluctance to grant citizens more power at the EU level, aiming to address the genuine or perceived disconnect in transnational representation. It specifically investigates disillusionment within the European Parliament (EP), among its officials and main political groups. The EP, as the only democratically elected EU institution, serving as the main channel between citizens and the EU policy-making, is the perfect case to study this disillusionment. Indeed, national-level research suggests that participatory tools yield positive outcomes only when they are meaningfully “coupled” with political elites and the decision-making process (Hendriks, 2016; Jäske and Setälä, 2020). Based on elite interviews with EP staff, official document analysis, and relevant literature, the study suggests that the so-called “trickle-down democracy”—the belief that increased democracy “at the top” will naturally reach citizens “at the bottom” (Beetz, Pittoors, and Wolfs, 2025)—and the instrumental use of citizen participation contribute to this disillusionment. In particular, some view citizen participation as a threat to EU representative democracy and the “trustees” role of MEPs. Furthermore, the instrumentalization of participation—using participatory tools to legitimise actions backfires, creating a boomerang effect that unintentionally delegitimises EU citizen participation among official and mainstream political actors within the EP.