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The European Commission's Online Consultations: A Success Story?
Abstract
Although depicted as an instrument oriented towards improving European governance as well as the democratic quality of European decision-making, the application of online consultations (OC) by the European Commission is accompanied by scepticism about their actual use. Based on a large-N, quantitative analysis, this article examines the application of and participation patterns in OC. With regard to the most relevant indicators applied in the study openness, transparency and inclusiveness the analysis reveals rather mixed results: while OC enhance the involvement of interested parties and formally offer the possibility to give qualitative input, at present, OC are far from being inclusive, nor is their practice transparent.
... First, the density and diversity of participation are linked to representational bias. Understanding the levels of participation and the diversity of actors participating is fundamental for understanding and assessing the presence and the extent of representational bias and unequal interest representation and influence over policymaking (Binderkrantz et al., 2021;Bunea, 2017;Pagliari & Young, 2016;Quittkat, 2011;Rasmussen & Carroll, 2014). Low levels of participation in the formulation of policies raise concerns about the extent to which the affected interests were heard and considered by policymakers, negatively impacting the input legitimacy of policymaking. ...
... 2. Understanding the levels and diversity of stakeholders' participation in public commenting 2.1. The importance of institutional setting and policy acts The research examining patterns of stakeholder participation in the well-established EC open public consultations proposes four sets of factors to explain the levels and diversity of stakeholder participation: stakeholder-level characteristics such as interest type represented, organizational form, resource-endowment, policy insider status (Bunea, 2014(Bunea, , 2017Quittkat, 2011), and/or embeddedness into policy and organizational networks (Bunea, 2015); policy area characteristics (Rasmussen & Carroll, 2014;Van Ballaert, 2017); policy issue characteristics (Røed & Wøien Hansen, 2018); consultation format characteristics (Binderkrantz et al., 2021;Fraussen et al., 2020). The scholarship examining participation in public consultations organized by the EU executive agencies speaks of a similar set of factors, emphasizing the importance of institutional opportunity structures and issue-level characteristics (Chalmers, 2015;Pagliari & Young, 2016) and/or consultation format . ...
... In absolute terms, most comments came from business associations and companies which authored together almost half (47.5%) of them. The public commenting mechanism does not seem to have improved considerably the imbalances in interest representation and the strong, sometimes predominant, presence of business that marked existing EC open public consultations (Quittkat, 2011;Rasmussen & Carroll, 2014). This reminds us about the challenges bureaucracies face when attempting to "make policy public" (Moffitt, 2014) and encourage a more diverse, and especially citizen-based, participation in venues that were traditionally the place of elite, technocratic decision-making (Quick & Bryson, 2016). ...
What explains the levels and diversity of stakeholder participation in public commenting on bureaucratic policymaking? We examine a novel dataset on a stakeholder engagement mechanism recently introduced by the European Commission containing information about 1258 events organized between 2016 and 2019. We highlight the importance of administrative acts' characteristics and acknowledge the role of policy area type. Acts corresponding to early policy stages, broader in scope, less technical, and more explicit about feedback loop rules, that is, roadmaps, inception impact assessments and delegated acts, generate significantly more comments, from more diverse stakeholders, relative to legislative proposals, and draft implementing acts. Regulatory and distributive policies generate significantly more comments than interior and foreign policies. Diversity is significantly higher in distributive policies but only relative to foreign policies. We contribute by showing the power of administrative acts in influencing stakeholder participation and diversity across decision stages and policy areas and shaping bias in interest representation.
... In theory, citizen engagement could help address the EU's democratic deficit and the legitimacy of the policymaking process. We analyse these engagement efforts through the lens of the European Union (EU)'s democratic governance, and in particular consultation patterns (Bunea and Ibenskas 2017;Kohler-Koch and Finke 2007;Kohler-Koch and Quittkat 2013;Quittkat 2011;Quittkat and Kotzian 2011;Saurugger 2008). ...
... In this respect it points toward the EU democratic deficit and the (lack of sufficient) transparency as concerns EU policymaking, which among other factors, induces political distrust (Saurugger 2008(Saurugger , 2010. It also pays attention to different aspects of political participation and governance, such as the concept of interest representation (Kohler-Koch 2010; Kohler-Koch and Quittkat 2009), categories of stakeholders and applied strategies (Binderkrantz 2008;Dür 2008;Dür and Mateo 2013;Klüver 2013), institutional participation tools, such as consultation regimes (Bunea 2017;Quittkat 2011;Quittkat and Kotzian 2011) and the European Citizens' Initiative (De Clerck-Sachsse 2012), or the role of public opinion (Rasmussen, Mäder, and Reher 2018;Rasmussen and Reher 2019). ...
... 7 For political institutions, myriad digital communication channels are available from online news coverage and political campaigns to direct citizen interaction on social media and dedicated engagement platforms. A primary tool used by the EC to engage citizens is online public consultations (Quittkat 2011). Through its stakeholder engagement strategy and digital means, the EC pushes the EU governance model towards a more inclusive one. ...
This paper asks to what extent the European Commission’s stakeholder participation model takes into account non-expert citizen contributions in policy processes pertaining to copyright. In theory, the increasing scale of citizen engagement in stakeholder consultations on copyright could help address the EU’s democratic deficit. The paper analyses the European Commission’s consultation processes in copyright policy across the Barroso 1&2 and Juncker Commissions (2004–2019). It documents the scale and the type of stakeholder involvement in public consultations. Through expert interviews and a survey, the paper gives critical insight into stakeholders’ perception of the Commission’s consultation practices and citizens’ role in policymaking. It concludes that the Commission is inclusive of different types of stakeholders, but casts doubt on the (perceived) motivation and appropriateness of its stakeholder participation model for non-expert citizens. The paper thus sheds light on the attempts and the struggle to engage with citizens in a digital age.
... Importantly, consultation procedures may vary considerably in terms of inclusiveness (closed versus open), and more precisely with respect to the types of interests that gain representation (for instance, business and/or citizen interests) (Beyers and Arras, 2019;Pedersen et al., 2015;Quittkat and Kotzian, 2011;Van Ballaert, 2017). Open procedures refer to public consultations and rely largely on the bottom-up mobilization of societal interests (Halpin, 2011;Pagliari and Young, 2016;Rasmussen, 2015;Yackee, 2014;Young and Pagliari, 2015;Quittkat, 2011). When an agency wants to establish a new policy or change some existing policy, it launches an open call, inviting all stakeholders (individual citizens, companies, or organizations), to submit their opinions and supply relevant information. ...
... Usually such consultations and the submitted opinions are processed via a website portal and may involve a list of specific closed and/or open questions. In the final stage of the consultation, the agency publishes a report in which it summarizes the submitted opinions and clarifies how and to what extent the proposed policy was modified in view of the received information (Quittkat, 2011;Yackee and Yackee, 2006). Although sometimes a particular audience is addressed in the consultation call, a key feature is that in principle anyone can participate. ...
... For improving validity and reliability, all 2 Several EU-level agencies grew out of EU-wide regulatory networks consisting of national level regulators. National governments are key decision-makers in EU legislative processes, and national regulators take an active part in implementing EU regulations (Egeberg and Trondal, 2017;Bunea and Thomson, 2015;Quittkat, 2011). The areas of aviation safety, medicine regulation, and aviation attract a substantial number of national regulatory authorities (Arras and Braun, 2018). ...
To facilitate stakeholder representation, European Union (EU) agencies use a range of procedures, including closed consultation or advisory committees and open or public consultations. For analysing what kind of stakeholders gain access to advisory committees, we compare these two particular procedures. Two theoretical perspectives guide this analysis. The first is a resource‐based account, which emphasizes informational needs and leads to the expectation that not only regulated interests but also EU‐level associations and European Commission expert group members will gain representation through closed consultations. The second is a norm‐based perspective that stresses the importance for agencies to establish a credible reputation, leading them to balance interest representation. A systematic comparison of stakeholders represented in agency committee with those participating in open consultations demonstrates that regulated interests have no systematic advantage in gaining access to closed consultations. Instead, closed consultations may diversify interest representation and facilitate the involvement of non‐business interests.
... Secondly, the survey questionnaire format could have an impact on participation. Previous studies found higher citizen participation in public consultations when the citizens were provided with a survey (Marxsen, 2015;Quittkat, 2011). It can be argued that it is more costly to formulate feedback in an open format, compared to answering a closed-ended questionnaire (Beyers and Arras, 2019;Quittkat, 2011). ...
... Previous studies found higher citizen participation in public consultations when the citizens were provided with a survey (Marxsen, 2015;Quittkat, 2011). It can be argued that it is more costly to formulate feedback in an open format, compared to answering a closed-ended questionnaire (Beyers and Arras, 2019;Quittkat, 2011). For these reasons, I control for open public consultations to examine whether this consultation format is the sole driver of participation in the pre-formulation stage. ...
The European Commission has shown efforts to strengthen citizens’ participation in its policy formulation processes through public consultation opportunities. However, we currently lack a systematic analysis of the factors that drive citizens’ participation in the formulation stages of supranational policymaking. This study provides important insights into this research gap and considers whether and how policy context matters for the levels of citizen engagement in the European Commission's open consultation opportunities based on the associated costs and benefits of participation. The analysis shows an increase in citizen activity for public consultation opportunities associated with initiatives in the pre-formulation stage of policymaking and for public consultation opportunities associated with less complex consultation documents.
... Studies have found that it is mostly business groups that have the means to comment on EU agency consultations and that frequently participate (Chalmers 2015;Beyers and Arras 2019). This is noteworthy as consultations were established to facilitate citizen and public interest engagement by lowering the costs of participation (Bignami 1999;Quittkat 2011). ...
... One could argue that business has a higher influence rate than diffuse interest groups because they are better able than diffuse interest groups to supply the information regulatory agencies need most: meaningful technical expertise (Beyers and Arras 2019;Crow et al. 2016;Quittkat 2011;Yackee and Yackee 2006;Yackee 2019). Regulated actors possess scarce information about their sector, the firm-level consequences of regulation, and its feasibility (Binderkrantz et al. 2014;Beyers and Arras 2019). ...
EU agencies have become important regulatory venues. Initially established to provide expert advice, many have gained far-reaching decision-making and enforcement powers. This has attracted considerable attention from stakeholders, but the extent of their influence on EU agency conduct has remained a black box. We employ a novel dataset of 203 consultations (2007–2017) containing 26,468 attempts of stakeholders to change proposed regulatory rules by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, as well as the agency’s response. This dataset allows for an original approach to measuring influence by linking influence attempts to rule changes. We found that business interests are far more influential than diffuse public interests. This has important implications for the legitimacy of EU agency stakeholder policies, as they are meant to make EU agencies more broadly accessible. National regulators are also influential in EU agency consultations, pointing to the unacknowledged importance of stakeholder consultations for EU-national regulator interactions.
... the amount of bias in group mobilization, in the political activities carried out by groups and in the access of groups to the EU system (Berkhout et al., 2017;Beyers et al., 2008Beyers et al., , pp. 1114Beyers et al., -1115Binderkrantz & Rasmussen, 2015;Rasmussen & Gross, 2015). In addition, recent studies have analysed group participation in EU Commission consultations with a focus on the use of open online consultations (Klüver, 2013;Quittkat, 2011;Rasmussen & Carroll, 2014;Røed & Hansen, 2018). While open consultation is the most highprofiled type of consultation, these co-exist with a range of other consultative forms such as stakeholder consultations or meetings with selected actors. ...
... First, with the exception of trade unions, it is evident that open online consultations increase the likelihood that all actor types are consulted. This finding supports the studies that find that online consultations are an effective way of reaching out to a broad variety of actors (Bunea, 2017;Quittkat, 2011;Quittkat & Kotzian, 2011). ...
The EU Commission regularly consults with external actors when preparing policy proposals. This paper investigates possible bias in the voices the Commission listens to across all policy areas and consultation instruments. We map the full range of consultation instruments used by the Commission and analyse variation in group representation across types of consultations and policy areas. Our analysis draws on a dataset of more than 350 major Commission proposals between 2011 and 2016. We find that the Commission has established a consultation regime with the widespread use of standard consultation instruments, including open online consultations, stakeholder conferences and consultation in closed fora. The range of consulted actors depends on both consultation instruments and policy types. Open online-consultations are most inclusive. Our findings indicate that the Commission may be able to counteract the influence of business by selecting the most appropriate format for consultation.
... Even though the four proposals were not randomly selected, they constitute relatively typical cases. The proposals were drafted by the four Directorate-Generals that rely most frequently vi on public consultations (Quittkat, 2011). In line with previous studies, the proposals exhibit a clear preponderance of firms and business associations among consultation participants and an underrepresentation of IGs from of Eastern European member states (e.g. ...
... Kusznir and Pleines, 2007;Quittkat, 2011;Rasmussen and Carroll, 2013). However, compared to the EU's Joint Transparency Register, NGOs are more strongly underrepresented in the survey population than they already are in the IG population (see the Online appendix). ...
Interest groups do not only attempt to influence European legislation by devising and executing their own strategies, or relying on their allies. Almost 50% have also experience in hiring political consultants. Using novel survey data from the policy formulation stage, this study shows that business interest groups are more likely to hire consultancies than non-business interest groups. It suggests that business associations' higher likelihood of hiring consultancies is linked to membership promotion. For firms, it likely relates to their need for specialised lobbying tools and trust-building measures when seeking private goods from policy-makers. Furthermore, the results indicate that consultancy hiring by business interest groups becomes less likely the more they focus on lobbying. This moderation effect highlights that business interest groups show awareness of principal-agent problems and take mitigating action.
... Our analysis comes with certain limitations. The public online consultations of the Commission are only one of many channels of influence for interest groups (Quittkat and Finke, 2008;van Ballaert, 2017), but research suggests that it is the most inclusive and unrestricted consultation instrument (Binderkrantz et al., 2021;Rasmussen and Toshkov, 2013), although with potential for improvement (Persson, 2007;Quittkat, 2011). While this research supports the claim, that our analysis of the online consultation covers a significant share of stakeholder activity, further research into other channels of influence can advance and supplement the findings. ...
... The research on stakeholder consultation has proliferated in recent years, particularly in the European Union (EU), where many scholars have analyzed how the EU institutions interact with stakeholders through different mechanisms such as open consultations (Quittkat, 2011;Rasmussen & Carroll, 2014;Røed & Wøien Hansen, 2018), parliamentary hearings (Coen & Katsaitis 2018;, expert groups (Gornitzka & Sverdrup, 2011;Vikberg, 2020) or through a combination of open and closed consultation approaches (Binderkrantz et al., 2022;Fraussen et al., 2020). Similarly, at the national level, we find studies examining stakeholder participation in consultation tools through expert groups in Belgium (Fraussen et al., 2015) or via parliamentary committees in Denmark (Pedersen et al., 2014). ...
... These organizations target multiple entities at different scales either simultaneously or over time, but their existence and work is inevitably shaped by the conditions-physical, legal and social-imposed by particular states (Tarrow 2005;Zajak 2017). At the same time, the Brussels-based NGOs face difficulties when seeking to trickle down their action to the domestic level and remain detached from national political dynamics (Quittkat 2011). Moreover, as stressed by Ruzza and Sánchez-Salgado (2021), the populist turn has rendered much of the literature on the role of CSOs in Europe obsolete. ...
This article examines how and under what conditions Italy’s civil society organizations (CSOs) have resorted to transnational activism and to what extent these efforts translate into impactful political advocacy. The analysis focuses on the action strategies of these civil society actors that have come under considerable pressure through the resurgence of populist–nationalist actors in the domestic arena. Developing an actor-centred perspective from below, this article draws on a series of 27 interviews conducted with these organizations’ representatives working primarily on issues related to migration and refugees in Italy. The empirical study examines some key initiatives that see domestic CSOs as protagonists in the transnational realm and explicates their motivations, approaches, and experiences. Conceptually, the article distinguishes between the vertical and horizontal Europeanization of CSOs. While there are notable opportunities for CSOs to engage in Brussels-centred governance and policy making, the effectiveness of horizontal Europeanization in the form of cross-border networking is—at first sight paradoxically—limited by the EU’s system of multi-level governance. The central argument about Europeanizing civil society activism is that these processes are primarily driven by a pragmatic pursuit of solutions to concrete political challenges that could not be properly addressed in an increasingly hostile domestic environment.
... In particular, when studying open consultations in the EU, Reenock and Gerber (2008, p. 430) confirmed that interest groups' access is indeed conditional on the quality of group information used in policy implementation; similarly, Rasmussen and Alexandrova (2012) found that foreign states representing economically well-connected markets are more likely to obtain access to EU institutions, and the same held true for interest groups with greater economic resources (Rasmussen & Gross 2015). Moreover, the level of bias among different types of interest groups has been convincingly linked to the specific format of the consultations under analysis (Quittkat 2011;Fraussen, Albareda & Braun 2020;Binderkrantz, Blom-Hansen & Senninger 2021), the characteristics of the policy issue (Rasmussen & Carroll 2013;Van Ballaert 2017;Røed & Hansen 2018) and the EU agencies involved (Pérez Durán 2018). This EU-level literature has also given rise at the national level to interesting studies on the relationship between interest groups and civil servants in Belgium and Germany (Fink & Ruffing 2020) (see Table SM1 in the Supplementary Materials for a systematic summary of the literature cited). ...
Studying how public administrations proactively search for
information from interest groups provides a new perspective
for a better understanding of how bureaucratic policymaking
works and how civil servants interact with interest groups.
Building on data collected through an online survey submitted
to approximately 700 high-level public servants in
Greece, Italy and Portugal, this paper investigates whether
and how organisational and individual policy analytical capacities
(dis)incentivise top officials’ solicitation and use of
information provided by interest groups in policymaking.
The emerging evidence is counter-intuitive: those who seek
information from interest groups most frequently are the
most competent top officials in the least (individually perceived)
competent areas of public administration. Thus,
focusing on policy analytical capacities could be very useful
for understanding administrative behaviour.
... Lobbying plays a particularly important role in the European Union (Lehmann and Bosche, 2003;Charrad, 2005;Greenwood, 2007;Coen, 2007;Schwartzkopff, 2009;Klüver, 2011;Thalassinos and Dafnos, 2015). In addition, the European Commission has engaged in participatory engineering to use interest groups inclusion to improve the democratic legitimacy of the European Union (Kohler-Koch and Finke, 2007;Bouwen, 2009;Quittkat, 2011;Klüver, 2009;2012;Liapis et al., 2013). ...
... Open online consultations were explicitly introduced by the Commission to improve its dialogue with stakeholders (Commission, 2001). According to many observers, open online consultations have in fact succeeded in involving a broader range of interests in the Commission's policy preparation and, thus, potentially increasing its input legitimacy (Binderkrantz et al., 2021;Bunea, 2017;Quittkat, 2011; but see Rasmussen & Carroll, 2014). ...
Governmental entities such as the EU Commission regularly consult societal stakeholders. In such consultations, a variety of different tools are used ranging from open online consultations over stakeholder conferences to discussions in closed policy fora. Recent research has demonstrated how the range and diversity of the consulted actors vary across these consultation formats. Yet, we know little about the value societal stakeholders attach to their participation in consultations. In this paper, we argue that some consultation formats facilitate an insider match between the motives of societal stakeholders and the Commission with clear potential for also affecting Commission initiatives. Other consultation instruments are more likely to facilitate an outsider match where stakeholders may draw public attention to their views and the Commission enhance the perceived legitimacy of its decisions. We find support for these expectations based on data from a survey administered to stakeholders registered in the EU transparency register.
... However, they have also been accused of prioritising the involvement of particular groups of actors and require specific expertise that place limitations on their results (Persson, 2007). They are also bound by particular structures, such as on-line consultations that often use standardised questionnaires, shaping the extent of problem-definition and inclusivity (Quittkat, 2011). This is a significant aspect to consider in the analysis of any public consultation process and is illustrative in some of the conclusions we are able to draw. ...
... The Gothenburg social summit was broadly perceived as a relevant added element to the consultation phase, which showed the higher engagement of the Commission and contributed to a sense of stronger involvement and the perception of a new phase being started. However, it was unanimously highlighted by the interviewees that the lack of clarity regarding the use of the remarks gathered during the consultation (namely, how the latter would be taken into consideration and elaborated into the final policy output) was still a major shortcoming that hinders the effective accountability and legitimacy of the overall process, despite the apparent efforts by the Commission to increase transparency (and in line with long-standing practices; Quittkat, 2011;Marxsen, 2015). ...
The launch of the European Pillar of Social Rights occurred at a phase of endogenous critical juncture for Social Europe. By analyzing the Pillar's formulation and adoption process, we investigate to what extent the European Commission used the involvement of civil society and policy responsiveness to foster change in the modes of governance and legitimize stronger intervention in the social sphere, by re-launching the methods of coordination introduced in the 1990s. Methodologically, we rely on a content analysis of EU policy documents before and after the public consultations, a content analysis of over 60 position papers and on interviews with policy actors. We find that despite increased openness and responsiveness, the Pillar initiative did not allow to alter the predominance of ‘soft law’ routes and patterns of intergovernmentalism characterizing the governance of EU social policy, a result that further qualifies the conditions that lead (endogenous) critical junctures to generate change.
... Online methods for getting input from and informing the wider public of the EU have existed for some time, and their use and impacts have been studied from different angles, including access and technical usability (Coleman and Gøtze 2001), quality, and content of discussions (Welp et al. 2009), evaluating who participates in deliberations or consultations (Heidbreder 2012;Kube et al. 2015;Persson 2007;Quittkat 2011), transparency, legitimacy, democracy, and inclusiveness (Eriksen 2005;Tomkova 2009;Wright 2007) and the potential for educating and raising awareness (Talpin and Wojcik 2010) of the online tools. How and why people contribute to online forums and dialogue depends on various factors such as time, website usability, confidence and fear, the quality of the discussion and other contributions, and feelings of belonging to the online community (Aristeidou et al. 2017). ...
To support legitimate European Union (EU) biodiversity policy development, there is a growing momentum to engage society in these policy processes and build meaningful and inclusive dialogue between science, policy, and society in policy deliberation. So far, engagement efforts have been made to encourage citizen participation in knowledge production via, for example, citizen science. At EU level means to encourage public participation have included a variety of online mechanisms for spreading information and promoting public deliberation. Despite these developments, the involvement of the general public in policy-making at the EU level has been rather inconsistent to date. In this article, we evaluate online science cafés as potential means to encourage dialogue between science, policy, and society; we ask what elements in their design and implementation are essential for inclusive dialogue between science, policy, and society. Our findings emphasise iterative dialogue when approaching multi-scalar challenges. This has important implications for developing legitimate participation across Europe.
... This perspective is often applied to the European Commission to explain its choice for different consultation instruments. These are designed narrowly to gain expertise (Van Ballaert, 2017), or broadly to give legitimacy to policy proposals (Quittkat, 2011), and help to improve the strategic position of the Commission (Bunea & Thomson, 2015). ...
Stakeholder engagement is thought to increase the legitimacy of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs). However, there is little research on how IRAs use the information that stakeholders contribute. We argue that the organizational reputation approach can explain different reactions to stakeholder engagement. IRAs usually rely on a reputation based on technical expertise. However, if IRAs have little capacities, they fall back on procedural or moral reputation. We analyze the consultations of the German Federal Network Agency (FNA) and the European Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) on planning electricity networks. Both have complex audience situations and an incentive to cultivate a technical reputation. However, their capacities differ. The FNA has capacities to cultivate a technical reputation, and selectively discusses technical contributions. ACER has less capacities. It selectively reacts to comments that criticize procedural aspects of network planning. Hence, we show how reputational concerns and capacities shape consultation procedures.
... During the first three consultations, there was a disproportionally large amount of input from business (Corporate Europe Observatory, 2014). Critics argue that this instrument is being sold as an integration of the broad public into the decision making, however, business has the leading role (Quittkat 2011). This confirms the importance of the iron triangle as the Commission needs the expertise of the business cooperatives in its policy preparation. ...
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) can be considered a game changer among trade agreements. TTIP not only aims to shape tomorrow's trade policy, but it has also had a huge influence on the democratic legitimacy of the EU. Based on recent literature on democratic legitimacy in the EU, this paper studies how the TTIP negotiations score in terms of input and throughput legitimacy. Our results show that these negotiations have had their fair share of problems, such as the disproportionally large influence of corporations, and a lack of transparency and accountability. However, these legitimacy problems occurred mainly in the first months of the negotiation process. Due to large scale protests and critiques from civil society, measures were taken to boost the legitimacy of the process.
... Jedną ze strategii lobbingowych jest udział w konsultacjach, zarówno o charakterze inkluzywnym (internetowe konsultacje publiczne) (Quittkat, 2011), jak i ekskluzywnym/deliberacyjnym (grupy eksperckie, grupy robocze, wysłuchania). Zwłaszcza te ostatnie cieszą się dużym zainteresowaniem interesariuszy (Quittkat, Kotzian, 2011: 412). ...
Artykuł poświęcony jest problematyce reprezentacji interesów w procesie kształtowania polityki publicznej. W szczególności podejmuje kwestie związane z zarządzaniem regulacyjnym dotyczącym relacji z grupami interesu oraz strategii stosowanych przez interesariuszy w procesach konsultacyjnych. Ponadto omówiono rolę, jaką grupy interesu odgrywają w polityce publicznej. Analiza dotyczy działań polskich grup interesu w obszarze prawa autorskiego, który zasługuje na uwagę zarówno ze względu na różnorodność aktorów, jak i na asymetrię interesów. Przeprowadzona analiza pozwala stwierdzić, że działania podejmowane przez interesariuszy w zakresie wzmacniania reprezentacji swoich interesów prowadzą do "nadreprezentacji" tych interesów, co - przy braku odpowiednich mechanizmów zarządzania regulacyjnego w zakresie udziału stron w konsultacjach - zwiększa ryzyko wystąpienia zjawiska "zawłaszczania regulacji" przez podmioty. Dane zostały zebrane w ramach monitoringu legislacyjnego projektów ustaw prawno-autorskich procedowanych w latach 2013-2019, a także w toku wywiadów półustrukturyzowanych przeprowadzonych w latach 2015-2018. W celu zilustrowania strategii lobbingowych za-stosowano metodę analizy sieci społecznych.
... 8 Populists insist that their programmes are quintessentially democratic since they express the "will of the people". But they count only their own supporters as such, excluding not just the "elites" but everyone else [hence the frequent references to the "real" or the "true" people; see Judis (2016), Mudde andKaltwasser (2017) or Müller (2017)]. The ease with which populist politicians can contort the democratic discourse and appropriate it for their own purposes puts a special obligation on democratic politicians to be clear in the terminology they use and to leave no doubt about their intentions, so as not to be accused of political obfuscation themselves. ...
The article argues that citizen engagement can reconnect science with society and improve related policymaking. This matters most for the challenges that defy purely technocratic solutions and call for changes in lifestyles and behaviour, the transition to climate neutrality and greater circularity being a prime example. To be effective, citizen engagement has to be inclusive, deliberative and influential; other forms of societal outreach fail this triple test. Participatory action research and citizen science can provide inspiration, as well as tools and techniques. Citizen engagement requires specific entry points—such as research and innovation “missions” or transition “super-labs”—which are most likely to emerge at the intersection between science on the one hand and markets and societies on the other. Policymakers need to design clear, predictable and enduring mechanisms but otherwise not interfere, to ensure that citizen engagement remains authentic and legitimate.
... Some of the reasons for the decline of the relevance of CSOs at the EU level are not related to populism. For instance, the diffusion of forms of internet-based consultations has made Brusselsbased CSOs less relevant, as the Commission and the Parliament can now consult widely across Member States without relying on top-level umbrella groups, which might appear detached from their national roots (Quittkat, 2011). However, beyond these practical reasons, the success of populists is further eroding the relevance of CSOs because these populists oppose all forms of political intermediation. ...
The introduction to this special issue identifies an analytical and empirical gap in studies on European civil society organisations (CSOs) in the wake of the rise of populism. It explains how different contributions address these gaps. To this end, it first provides a definition of the main terms, including populism and anti-populism. It reconsiders assumptions regarding the role of CSOs and social movements as agents of European democratisation and legitimation. The main argument is that the populist turn has led to significant changes regarding the role of CSOs in the EU policy process. These changes are visible in three different but interrelated ways: the relations between European institutions and CSOs, the changes in CSOs goals and strategies, and the changes in the patterns of interaction between CSOs and populist groups. The final part of the introduction gives a brief overview of the contributions to this special issue and highlights how they provide further insights into the overall topic of relations between the EU and CSOs.
... Typical research questions here concern mapping the landscape of actors participating (Eising, 2007;Greer et al., 2008;Rasmussen and Alexandrova, 2012), and to elucidate which actors succeed in getting their preferences heard in these online consultations (Bunea, 2013;Klüver, 2012Klüver, , 2013. Again, the connection to normative thought is apparent, the main question is whether these online consultations are biased towards business interests (Quittkat, 2011). This is all the more important if online participations are becoming a regular and recurring feature of the interest intermediation landscape. ...
Public participation has become a conditio sine qua non when planning infrastructure projects. However, current research is concerned with one-time experiments and can not elucidate long-term effects of iterated consultations. Our argument is that consultations have learning effects over time. We test our argument using the German procedure for electricity grid demand planning as a case. Using dictionary coding and a quantitative analysis, supplemented by a qualitative text analysis, we show that participants get better in framing their contributions by using the “right” keywords. Hence, consultations evolve over time and improve in terms of the output legitimacy they generate.
... Asimismo, tiene recorrido en la comunicación política trasnacional europea online la personalización, faceta que ha recibido ya una notable atención académica y que supone una aproximación del discurso enfocada en las personas, anteponiendo las cualidades intrínsecas de los oradores sobre el contenido o las ideologías de sus discursos, es decir la forma sobre el contenido (Sánchez-Murillo, 2005; López-Meri; Marcos-García; Casero-Ripollés, 2017), incluso específicamente en redes sociales (López-García, 2016), habiendo atendido recientemente algunas a la comunicación institucional (europea) del propio presidente francés, Enmanuel Macron (Habermas, 2017; Bouza-García; Tuñón-Navarro, 2018). Además, dentro del propio marco transnacional europeo, cada vez son más las investigaciones que inciden sobre campañas online, bien desde la perspectiva del supuesto déficit democrático (Davesa; Shahin, 2014), de los movimientos sociales (Bouza-García; Oleart; Tuñón-Navarro, 2019), o de las consultas ciudadanas (Quittkat, 2011). ...
Entre los diversos efectos secundarios del Brexit, la Comisión Europea reubicó la Agencia Europea de Medicamentos en Amsterdam. Las ciudades candidatasdiseñaron diferentes campañas de comunicación política/institucional para convencer a los países miembros a su favor. Esta investigación compara estas campañas políticas/organizacionales online y destaca las temáticas y variables en cuestión durante el proceso de selección. A través de un análisis combinado de contenido preferentemente cuantitativo, el estudio pretende validar la medida en que las teorías resource push o resource pull aplicadas a las compañas organizacionales, tuvieron correlación con la decisión final de reubicar la agencia en Amsterdam.
... Second, we assess the relation between consultation approaches and stakeholder diversity, focusing on business dominance. Much previous work has addressed these questions by focusing on variation in stakeholder engagement and business dominance via a single and specific consultation tool, such as expert groups Sverdrup 2008, 2011;Rasmussen and Gross 2015) or online consultation (Quittkat 2011;Quittkat and Kotzian 2011;Røed and Wøien Hansen 2018). These studies, however, do not consider the possible implications of combining several consultation tools (but see Pedersen et al. 2015), even though that is a common practice in specific policy processes. ...
Contemporary governance is increasingly characterized by the consultation of different types of stakeholders, such as interest groups representing economic and citizen interests, as well as public and private institutions, such as public authorities and firms. Previous research has demonstrated that public officials use a variety of tools to involve these actors in policymaking. Yet, we have limited knowledge on how particular consultation approaches relate to stakeholder participation. To what extent do open, closed and hybrid consultation approaches, with the first two, respectively, referring to the use of public and targeted tools, and the third one implying a combination of both of them, relate to the policy engagement of a different set of stakeholders? In this paper, we identify the different tools used by the European Commission to engage stakeholders in policymaking and assess how variation in consultation approaches relates to stakeholder participation via a descriptive and multivariate analysis. We rely on two datasets: a regulatory database that contains detailed information on 41 EU regulations and a stakeholder database that comprises 2617 stakeholders that were involved in these regulations through different consultation tools. Our main finding is that implementing different consultation approaches affects stakeholder diversity. Specifically, closed consultation approaches lead to a lower level of business dominance than hybrid approaches that combine open and targeted consultation tools.
... the method of comparing policy drafts before and after interest group lobbying has been advocated as an ideal way to detect groups' influence (Lowery 2013). While numerous studies of governments' open consultations with the public have been conducted in the european union (e.g., Klüver 2011;Quittkat 2011;rasmussen and alexandrova 2012;rasmussen and Carroll 2014) as well as in us federal agencies (golden 1998; yackee and yackee 2006), written comments to congressional committees have never before been analyzed in political science publications (but see Burstein's 2014 analysis of witness testimony in congressional committees). yet doing so is likely to yield significantly different conclusions about the ability of lobbyists to secure their policy preferences: "it's too hard to try to locate the precise policy concessions that each interest group is looking for; these can be quite specific and won't necessarily show up in aggregate measures of policy" (Fouirnaies and Hall 2017). ...
When do campaign contributions matter? This article advances the claim that a group that gives campaign contributions to US Members of Congress is more likely to achieve legislative success when (1) a single legislator can deliver to the group (2) a private benefit (3) without attracting negative attention. Using an original data set based on the written comments of nearly 900 interest groups lobbying the US Senate Finance Committee on health reform legislation in 2009, I link group requests to corresponding legislation. The analysis shows a significant relationship between lobby groups' campaign contributions and their legislative success, and at distinct units of analysis—the group, the side, and the group‐senator dyad. The relationship is particularly strong in predicting senators’ amendments in committee. The rare data presented here offer compelling evidence that interest groups' legislative victories are sometimes connected to campaign contributions in a way that previous studies could not identify.
... Albrecht (2012) reviews the e-consultation practice at EU level with a focus on the Your Voice in Europe platform, building on analyses of other scholars (cf. Quittkat and Finke 2008;Quittkat 2011;Tomkova 2009). His main points are as follows: online consultations have become a well-established instrument regularly used by practically all Directorate Generals (DGs). ...
In this chapter, Nielsen et al. propose options for improving e-participation at the EU level without changing underlying legal frameworks. In response to the challenges to e-participation, which arise out of current institutional designs, the authors make creative use of the research results presented earlier in the book to suggest ‘low-hanging fruits’ for practical reform. The challenges addressed include the relative weakness of individual citizens’ participation compared to that of CSO’s, the weakness of the Parliament in the legislative process and the continued de-coupling of the EU policy process from the will of the European citizens. While the chapter proposes no easy fixes, it points to some obvious practical steps forward. To improve existing participation mechanisms, the authors recommend providing improved support to citizens using the ECI, investing in the back-office support needed for the EP Petitions Portal to realize its potential and improving the scalability of Your Voice in Europe through advanced data analysis. They also make four novel proposals, first among which is to experiment with participatory budgeting in relation to the Regional and Social Funds. The chapter ends with a plea for a long-term vision of a unified European participation structure to gather and harness the potentials of individual mechanisms.
... Albrecht (2012) reviews the e-consultation practice at EU level with a focus on the "YViEu" platform, building on analyses of other scholars (cf. Quittkat and Finke 2008;Quittkat 2011;Tomkova 2009;Hüller 2008). His main points are: Online consultations have become a well-established instrument, regularly used by practically all DGs. ...
The chapter offers a systematic overview of the use of digital tools for various forms of political participation and the experiences made so far, based on an extensive literature review. Discerning three key functions of e-participation—monitoring, agenda-setting and input to decision-making—the authors review a variety of formally institutionalised mechanisms as well as informal expressions of civic engagement, including social media. The examination of digital tool use for monitoring purposes extends from electronic information access and exchange to e-deliberation, while the role for agenda-setting mainly includes uses for e-petitions and e-campaigning, showing a mixed picture of democratic impacts. The review of e-participation providing input for decision-making focusses on e-consultations, e-participative budgeting and e-voting, identifying several persisting problems with the latter instrument. A special section examines e-participation at EU-level, from deliberative citizens’ involvement projects and e-consultation to the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) and e-petitions to the European Parliament. Findings show that digital tools enhance direct and participative democracy in many respects; however, exaggerated expectations of new democratic potentials remain unfulfilled: deliberative participative designs lack any impact on decision-making, and the ECI still is rather an instrument for civil society mobilisation than citizen empowerment.
... Transparency, however, remains a big issue concerning the methodology chosen for consultation evaluation and a lack of feedback to the participants concerning their inputs (Researcher 26, see also Chalmers 2014, Quittkat 2011, Winkler 2007. All responses of the Commission are published on the website. ...
Rose et al. introduce four digital democratic tools which serve or have served to support formal agenda-setting on the European level (European Citizens’ Initiative, Futurium, Your Voice in Europe, and European Citizens’ Consultations). The authors place a strong focus on the participatory process and practical experiences. For a better understanding of these tools and how they are used in practice, interviews were conducted with administrators and researchers familiar with the respective tools. Strengths and weaknesses are identified and possibilities for improvements explored. While each tool shows positive results in different ways, their impact in terms of policy tools leaves much to be desired. Lessons learnt include the need to communicate clearly what input is desired from the participants and transparency about what outcomes can be expected and how the collected input is utilized. The tools must also be flexible enough to adapt to user feedback in order to provide for a learning process to take place.
... 122 Quittkat, C. (2011). The European Commission's online consultations: a success story?. ...
Fake news is a phenomenon that has been broadly studied in the last few years. The change of news media consumption habits brought by the internet and by social media networks allowed fake news dissemination to grow on an unprecedented scale. Nevertheless, the studies on the nemesis of fake news creators, journalists, are frequently cast aside when it comes to studying this problem. This article series tries to raise more attention in the academic discourse on disinformation to the role of journalists in general and that of European journalists in particular. In this research, we define European journalists’ self-perception in tackling fake news, their viewpoints on the issue, and what their opinion on the measures that the European Union has undertaken to restrain it. Finally, we try to give some examples of best practices to counteract and to resist, to fake news.
... Die Beteiligung der Öffentlichkeit bei der Planung von Über Konsultationen durch private Akteure in derartigen mehrstufigen Beteiligungsverfahren weiß die Politikwissenschaft aber noch wenig. Zwar haben wir reichhaltige Empirie über Konsultationen durch staatliche Akteure (Hüller 2008;Quittkat 2011;Klüver 2012 Damit ist nicht gesagt, dass ersteres objektiv richtig und letzteres ...
Es ist etablierte Praxis, dass Behörden die Öffentlichkeit vor wichtigen Entscheidungen beteiligen. In jüngster Zeit sind auch private Akteure wie Unternehmen gefordert, vor Großprojekten die Öffentlichkeit zu beteiligen. Der Beitrag untersucht, wie sich Teilnehmerfeld und Stellungnahmen dieser Konsultationen unterscheiden in Abhängigkeit davon, ob Behörden oder Unternehmen die Konsultation durchführen. Empirischer Fall ist die Aufstellung des Netzentwicklungsplanes Strom durch Netzbetreiber und Bundesnetzagentur, die beide die Öffentlichkeit beteiligen. Ergebnis ist, dass BürgerInnen sich häufiger an die Bundesnetzagentur wenden, und dass vor allem professionelle Akteure der Interessenvermittlung die Möglichkeit der doppelten Konsultationsteilnahme nutzen. Die tauschtheoretische Vermutung, dass an die Netzbetreiber vor allem ökonomische und an die Bundesnetzagentur vor allem juristische Argumente gerichtet werden, bestätigt sich nicht. Allerdings nutzen die KonsultationsteilnehmerInnen die Konsultation bei der Bundesnetzagentur, um die mangelnde Responsivität der Netzbetreiber zu kritisieren. Eine Lösung könnte sein, staatlichen Akteuren mehr Kompetenzen zu geben, die Konsultationen von Unternehmen zu begleiten und rechtlich einzurahmen.
In this Chapter we explore the fundamental differences in structures, goals and dynamics separating digitalised public spaces from private spaces. Five are especially important. Namely: inclusivity, longevity, generality, reliability, and publicity. The first (inclusivity) can be summarised as follows: digital public spaces aim to be inclusive. Consumer tech can be—and often is—exclusive. The second difference is longevity. It describes the aspiration of public regulation to be as durable as possible. Consumer tech instead plans its obsolescence. Third on the list is generality. Democratic spaces are designed by governments to serve the interests of large and undifferentiated communities. Consumer tech aims primarily at targeting individual users. Fourth, virtual democratic spaces differ from consumer tech in terms of reliability. Consumers are always offered the chance to opt out and adopt cheaper or more functional alternatives. However, citizens are usually not offered any alternative to the policy-making tools that are provided by a particular governmental authority. That is, they cannot opt out of one tool and then re-engage via a different, more useful or attractive digital technology. Fifth and finally, technological forms of power are structured on the principle of secrecy. Public powers are instead grounded on the principles of publicity and officiality.KeywordsPolarizationBroadcast modelOne-to-many approachCognitive overloadDigital inequalitySunset clausesLongevity principleProgrammed obsolescenceLegal dynamismDigital representativenessCompulsory digitalityCivicTechNew feudal societyDemocratic dissonanceOnlifeDigital undemocratic
There is a striking paradox in EU democracy. The EU is the first jurisdiction to expressly embrace participation as an autonomous, complementary, source of legitimacy. Yet its day-to-day operations remain broadly closed to participation. By building on the extensive scholarship on democracy in the EU, this chapter evaluates the state of EU participatory democracy a decade after its inclusion in the EU treaties, by shedding some light on both its normative and practical realities. Section 2 briefly reconstructs the genesis and evolution of participatory democracy in the EU. Section 3 maps out and systematizes the many participatory mechanisms available to EU citizens—from petitions to the EU Parliament, complaints to the European Ombudsman, to European Citizens’ Initiatives—and illustrates how participatory democracy has been elevated to become one of the foundations of democracy in the EU. Section 4 examines the realities of participation by unveiling how current practices are characterized by unequal access, limited representativeness, and ultimately the disparate influence of participants. Section 5 puts forward some recommendations on how to unleash the democratic potential of EU participatory democracy in light of the Conference on the Future of Europe, an unprecedented, institutionally short-lived democratic exercise, but whose consequences should not be underestimated.KeywordsEuropean UnionDemocracyParticipationParticipatory democracyDeliberationMini-publicConference on the Future of EuropeEU
In 2014, the European Commission initiated a process to strengthen science 2.0 as a core research policy concept. However, this turned into a substantial ideational shift. The concept of science 2.0 was dropped. Instead, open science became established as one of the three pillars of the €94 billion research framework programme Horizon Europe. This article scrutinises the official narrative regarding the shift of concepts, identifying transparency issues, specifically misrepresentation of concepts and data, and the redaction of key material. This can be characterised as problems of input legitimacy. A public consultation did take place, but numerous transparency issues can be found. From science 2.0 to open science, the ideational shift was portrayed as simply a matter of exchanging two synonymous concepts. However, science 2.0 is a descriptive concept referring to science being transformed by digitalisation. In contrast, open science involves normative assumptions about how science should work and be governed.
Despite the increasing use of various e-democracy tools in shaping new policies, there is still a general lack of empirical studies on the influence of non-state actors in online public consultations. This article addresses this gap in the academic literature by focusing on the case of Croatia, which may have relevant broader practical and theoretical implications due to the legally binding rules of institutional responsiveness to individual policy inputs received during e-consultations and the growing interest of citizens and various interest groups to get engaged in this form of policy dialogue. Drawing on the novel data set that includes the responses of 39 government bodies to 51,250 policy inputs of interest groups and individual citizens to online consultations during the first three years since the launch of the government consultation platform, the paper seeks to analyse the influence of different types of non-state actors on the outcomes of government-led online public consultations. Contrary to general expectations about the predominance of more resourceful interest groups, it is argued that individual citizens exert a noticeable influence on the results of online policy consultations of Croatian government bodies. It is also claimed that the specific design and patterns of online public consultations, especially improved responsiveness of government bodies, contribute to the pluralisation of interests, equalizing political representation, and empowering individual citizens and other new actors, beyond traditional interest groups and “usual suspects” in national decision-making processes.
At a time when Europe and business stand at crossroads, this study provides a perspective into how business representation in the EU has evolved and valuable insights into how to organize lobbying strategies and influence policy-making. Uniquely, the study analyses business lobbying in Brussels by drawing on insights from political science, public management, and business studies. At the macro-level, we explore over thirty years of increasing business lobbying and explore the emergence of a distinct European business-government relations style. At the meso-level, we assess how the role of EU institutions, policy types, and the policy cycle shape the density and diversity of business activity. Finally, at the micro-level we seek to explore how firms organize their political affairs functions and mobilized strategic political responses. The study utilizes a variety of methods to analyse business-government relations drawing on unique company and policy-maker surveys; in-depth case studies and elite interviews; large statistical analysis of lobbying registers to examine business the density and diversity; and managerial career path and organizational analyses to assess corporate political capabilities. In doing so, this study contributes to discussions on corporate political strategy and interest groups activity. This monograph should be of interest to public policy scholars, policy-makers, and businesses managers seeking to understand EU government affair and political representation.
This chapter defends the hypothesis that depoliticisation practices in the European Union (EU) stem from the EU’s institutions and actors’ relationship, both singular and long-standing, with “the political” and representative democracy. To do so, this chapter starts by highlighting the omnipresence of the logics of depoliticisation and listing its main methods—expertise, informal negotiation, permanent consultation of interest groups—in making European policies. Trying then to identify what feeds these depoliticisation initiatives, it underlines a relationship of distrust regarding the mechanisms of representative democracy, which is linked to the genesis and institutionalisation of the European field of power and widely shared among Europe’s professionals.
This chapter looks into the unprecedented increase in the number of interest organizations during the accession process to the European Union dating from the early 1990s up to 2004. We argue that faced with the competitive pluralistic and multilevel governance of the EU, interest groups in CEE countries went through a ‘crash course’ in lobbying professionalization. We look into different forms of engagement in the European policy process, both at the European and national levels, analyzing the existing institutional framework for consultations in European policy-making, the stakeholders approached, the expenditures of organizations, and their membership of umbrella organizations. The comparative analysis allows us to elaborate on similarities and differences between the old and new Members States of the European Union.
PhD thesis defended at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University Doctoral School of Law and Political Sciences on November 4, 2020.
In this article, I argue that the experimentalist model of democracy can contribute to contemporary disputes about deliberation at the supranational level. The fundamental idea is that, in conditions of disagreement, for a decision to be legitimate, deliberative decision-making processes must be structured so as to allow the inclusion of affected interests before and after voting. I argue that there are three ways for a decision to be illegitimate: exclusion of affected interests from all deliberative phases, Captain Hook politics and garbage-time politics. Captain Hook politics and garbage-time politics illuminate an important variable: in a deliberative process, some interests may enter deliberation too early, other interests too late. However, for a decision to be legitimate, it is not only important that all affected interests can have an influence on collectively binding decisions, but it is also important what moment in time such interests play a part in the deliberative process.
The presence of communication channels plays a key role in how interest groups engage in EU policymaking. However, the capacity of researchers to explain these patterns is constrained by the informal and opaque nature of such interaction. In this paper we develop a novel text-as-data approach which maps the informal patterns of information exchange among the stakeholders that engage with EU policymaking by detecting instances of text reuse among the comment letters submitted by these groups to the same policy proposal. We use this approach to analyse a novel dataset of publicly available comments to a wide a range of EU policies. We find that there are significant differences between the structure of information exchange networks and more formal lobbying coalitions in the EU, as well as between the groups that engage in these forms of coordination.
The objective of the article is to assess the new Commission’s Guidelines on Stakeholder Consultation (2015) in the EU policy-shaping in view of raising effectiveness of the EU governance model and of reducing the EU democratic deficit. The hypothesis of the article is that the Commission’s revision of the stakeholder consultation procedures contributes to overcoming the EU crisis of the consultation model and, in general, to reducing the democratic deficit in the EU. The neoinstitutional research perspective permits to catch the relations between the EU institutions and stakeholders wanting to co-shape EU sectoral policies, and the concepts of the UE democratic legitimacy (by F. Scharpf) as well as of the deliberative democracy (by J. Habermas) make possible to verify the research hypothesis. The verification takes place also in the course of the analysis of the new guidelines by confronting them with the identified deficits in matters of the dialogue with stakeholders.
Agencies consult extensively with stakeholders such as industry associations, nongovernmental organizations, and trade unions. One rationale for consultations is that these improve procedural legitimacy and lead to greater acceptance of regulatory outcomes by citizens and the regulated industry. While this presumption of a positive relation between stakeholder consultations and the legitimacy of agencies is widespread, research analyzing this relationship remains scarce. Using a survey experiment, we examine the effect of open and closed consultations on the acceptance of procedures and regulatory outcomes in the field of environmental politics. The results demonstrate that consultation arrangements positively affect the acceptance of decision‐making procedures, especially when regulators grant access to different types of stakeholders. However, although the consultation arrangement itself does not directly affect acceptance of the regulatory outcome, procedural legitimacy matters, as it increases decision acceptance among individuals who are negatively disposed toward government regulation.
Digital technologies have impacted almost every aspect of our society, including how people participate in activities that matter to them. Indeed, digital participation allows people to be involved in different societal activities at an unprecedented scale through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Still, enabling participation at scale requires making it seamless for people to: interact with a variety of software platforms, get information from connected physical objects and software services, and communicate and collaborate with their peers. Toward this objective, this paper introduces and formalizes the concept of Social Participation Network, which captures the diverse participation relationships – between people, digital services and connected things – supporting participatory processes. The paper further presents the early design of an associated online service to support the creation and management of Social Participation Networks. The design advocates the instantiation of Social Participation Networks within distinct participation contexts—spanning, e.g., private institutions, neighbor communities, and governmental institutions—so that the participants’ information and contributions to participation remain isolated and private within the given context.
This article focuses on how we imagine our digitally mediated society
and on whether alternative worlds or pathways are possible.
The chapter starts with an outline of outstanding recent contributions to the discussion of the EU democratic deficit and the so-called “no demos” problem and the debate about European citizenship and European identity—mainly in the light of insights from the EU crisis. This is followed by reflections on the recent discussion on the state of the mass media-based European public sphere. Finally, the author discusses the state of research on the Internet’s capacity to support the emergence of a (renewed) public sphere, with a focus on options for political actors to use the Internet for communication and campaigning, on the related establishment of segmented issue-related publics as well as on social media and its two-faced character as an enabler as well as a distorting factor of the public sphere. The author is sceptic about the capacities of Internet-based political communication to develop into a supranational (European) public sphere. It rather establishes a network of a multitude of discursive processes aimed at opinion formation at various levels and on various issues. The potential of online communication to increase the responsiveness of political institutions so far is set into practice insufficiently. Online media are increasingly used in a vertical and scarcely in a horizontal or interactive manner of communication.
After centuries of absence, sortition is making its return through academic research, practical experiments, and activists’ calls for linking participation and deliberation. These invocations of sortition, however, offer divergent accounts of the concept and different justifications. Gastil and Wright’s proposal for a “sortition chamber” provides one such example, but sortition can be conceptualized more broadly. When properly analyzed in this larger sense, one can better appreciate how sortition satisfies democratic principles—often in novel ways that go beyond those enumerated in the lead chapter of this volume.
To better understand the implications of sortition, I begin by contrasting it with the other modes of selection democracies use to place people in positions of power, including not only elections but also nomination and certifi cation. I then distinguish varieties of sortition that differ by their mandate, the population from which a random sample is drawn, and the degree to which service is voluntary or compulsory. Depending on the design considerations such as these, sortition can provide a novel means of realizing the democratic aspirations of equality, impartiality, representativeness, and legitimacy.
Courant Dimitri (2019), "Sortition and Democratic Principles: A Comparative Analysis", in Gastil and Wright (eds.), Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance, Verso, New York/London, p. 229-248.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2969-legislature-by-lot
In comparison to the democratic nation state, the institutions of European
and global governance clearly suffer from a democratic deficit. Many have
argued that the increased participation of civil society in international
governance may be a cure for this democratic deficit and this collection
investigates whether this argument is supported by empirical evidence. Ten
original essays use comparative research to analyze current patterns of
civil society consultation in thirty-two intergovernmental organizations and
regimes, including the European Union. In particular, chapters examine
problems of access, transparency, responsiveness and inclusion. The study
concludes that civil society consultation holds much promise for rectifying
the democratic deficit but that most institutional arrangements in their
current form fall short of realizing their democratizing potential.
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/civil-society-participation-in-european-and-global-governance-jens-steffek/?K=9780230006393
While population decline is already in evidence in several countries in Europe, at aggregate level (European Union and Europe as a whole) the population in 2007 still increased. The main driver of this population growth was once again migration, which counterbalanced the negative natural change in some countries.
If the rhetoric pervading much of recent academic and policy discourse is to be taken at face value, engaging the public in the governance of science has become a kind of gold standard. However, very little is known about citizens' perspectives on public engagement in the governance of science, let alone about the social processes and the meaning participation acquires within actual engagement exercises. This article analyses the bottom-up meanings of the concept of public participation in a public engagement exercise in Austria, and traces the variety of connotations and implications that this term was given by the participating citizens and scientists. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.
Civil society participation in international and European governance is often promoted as a remedy to its much-lamented democratic deficit. We argue in this paper that this claim needs refinement because civil society participation may serve two quite different purposes: it may either enhance the democratic accountability of intergovernmental organisations and regimes, or the epistemic quality of rules and decisions made within them. In comparing the European Union and World Trade Organization (WTO) in the field of biotechnology regulation we find that many participatory procedures officially are geared towards the epistemic quality of regulatory decisions. In practice, however, these procedures provide little space for epistemic deliberation. Nevertheless, they often lead to enhanced transparency and hence improve the accountability of governance. We also find evidence confirming findings from the literature that the different roles assigned to civil society organisations as “watchdogs” and “deliberators” are at times difficult to reconcile. Our conclusion is that we need to acknowledge potential trade-offs between the two democratising functions of civil society participation and should be careful not to exaggerate our demands on civil society organisations.
As part of the strategy for better governance, the European Commission has taken steps towards improved consultation and dialogue on European Union (EU) policy with interested parties. Opening up the policy process and getting interest groups involved are considered important for the democratic legitimacy of EU policy making. This article examines the public Internet consultation on the Commission proposal for a new European chemicals policy, the so-called REACH system. Being one of the most consulted issues in EU history, the chemicals policy review is considered as a critical test for the participatory mechanisms provided by the European Communities. By analysing more than 6000 contributions to the consultation, it is demonstrated that it invited broad participation, although industry was considerably better represented than NGOs and other civil society associations. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of participants were national actors from the largest member states rather than transnational actors. It is concluded that online consultations can invite broad participation in EU policy shaping but it is unlikely to bring about equal participation from different group of actors. Therefore it raises concern when measured against standards of democratic governance.
This p er empirically analyses whether 'Futurum', the online discussion forum linked to the Convention on the Future of Europe, constituted a public sphere - and, if so, what kind. Although the debates were discursive and had an institutional context, they were not filtered into the convention process and had an unrepresentative group of participants and thus they sit ill at ease with established conceptualizations of the public sphere.
It is argued that, in the EU environment, social movements are important actors and acquire distinctive traits in terms of coalitional activities, inter-institutional relations, modes of financing, and representational activities. They put forward an often utopian vision of desirable policy changes that other non-state organizations and institutional activists can utilise as a negotiating standards, whilst recognising, however, that they may be unachievable. This role is appreciated by institutional activists — bureaucratic and political actors sympathetic to movements — who typically attempt to channel funds, legitimacy and visibility to social movement organizations, both for reasons of ideological congruence and to engage in processes of bureau-shaping and budget maximising from which they benefit. The relative absence of strong policy steering on the EU level enables them to do so to a larger extent than in national polities. This is however more likely to occur when there is a specific legal base that legitimises movements’ support.
The relationship between business and the EU institutions has evolved from its corporatist origins into a complex elite pluralist arrangement centered around industrial fora and policy committees. We view the growth of forum politics as the direct consequence of the unprecedented boom in economic and public interest lobbying in the early 1990s: While the increase in European interest representation provided greater legitimacy for the European integration program, it put a strain on the existing open pluralist European business-government relationship. One of the European Commission's (EC) informal solutions was to create restricted-entry policy fora and select committees, which it hoped would provide fast and reliable decisionmaking. Employing a formal model of industrial fora and committees, we specify the mechanisms that we believe caused the establishment of the current elite pluralist system of interest representation in the EU. We argue that in the process of establishing selective-entry fora for interest representation, the European Commission acted not only as policy entrepreneur, but also as a political entrepreneur, fostering collective action. Die Beziehungen zwischen Wirtschaft und EU-Institutionen hat sich aus korporatistischen Anfängen zu einem komplexen Arrangement elitenpluralistischer Strukturen entwickelt, in dessen Mittelpunkt Industrieforen und Policy-Komittees stehen. Wir analysieren die wachsende Bedeutung dieser Forum Politics als direkte Folge des (wirtschaftlichen und zivilgesellschaftlichen) Lobbying-Booms der frühen 90er-Jahre. Obschon die vermehrte europäische Interessenvertretung die Legitimtät des europäischen Integrationsprogramms erhöhte, setzte sie zugleich das bestehende System offener pluralistischer Beziehungen zwischen Wirtschaft und europäischen Institutionen unter Druck. Als eine informelle Lösung dieses Problems etablierte die Europäische Kommission nichtständige Policy-Fora und Ausschüsse, deren Zugang sie kontrollierte. Mit Hilfe eines formalen Modells identifizieren wir die Mechanismen, die unseres Erachtens zu der Entwicklung des gegenwärtigen elitenpluralistischen Systems der EU-Interessenvertretung geführt haben. Wir argumentieren, dass die Europäische Kommission mit der Einrichtung zugangsbeschränkter Fora zur Interessenvertretung nicht nur as 'policy entrepreneur' tätig wurde, sondern auch als 'political entrepreneur' kollektives Handeln von Interessenvertretern förderte.
Citizens’ conferences attempt to include citizens in the decisional and political process. Created to foster deliberation and public debate on disputed issues, they place ordinary citizens in the spotlight and ask them to express their views, after having debated the issues with specialists. Whereas the conferences conducted in a domestic context have been well analyzed, little attention has been given so far to the first attempts to replicate the experience at the European level, and to the specific problems that may be encountered in so doing. Two main reasons have prompted the EU to pay interest to this participatory mechanism: functional reasons (the need to take position on a socio-technological controversy whose stakes are controversial) and political legitimacy (the absence of a strong democratic legitimacy at the EU level). Based on an analysis of the first two experiments organized in the EU, devoted to “the city of tomorrow” and to brain sciences respectively, this article argues that achieving such citizen deliberation is not without problems. In many respects, these problems point to the difficulty entailed in the creation of a European public space: the elusive quest for a “European people”; the question of representation according to the size of the countries; the issue of languages. At the same time, the main potential of this instrument may lie in its cognitive impact, since the interpretations and knowledge surrounding the issues which are debate may influence both the agenda-setting and the decision-making process.
Starting from the findings of an earlier compliance study covering the 15 'old' Member States of the European Union, which identified three 'worlds of compliance', this article seeks to establish whether or not the new Member States from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) represent a separate world of compliance. We present empirical findings from a research project on the implementation of three EU Directives from the field of working time and equal treatment in four CEE countries. The evidence suggests that the new Member States display implementation styles that are similar to a few countries in the EU-15. The expectation that the new Member States might behave according to their own specific logic, such as significantly decreasing their compliance efforts after accession in order to take 'revenge' for the strong pressure of conditionality, is not supported by our case studies. Instead, all four new Member States appear to fall within a group that could be dubbed the 'world of dead letters'. It is crucial to highlight, however, that this specific 'world of compliance', characterized by politicized transposition processes and systematic application and enforcement problems, also includes two countries from the EU-15.
'Smismans gathers a fine selection of papers. The book gains particular authority from its interdisciplinary approach.'
In the view of the European Commission and many EU scholars, European democracy should be deliberative and the democratisation process as such fostered via civil society involvement. But until now, no one has developed a plausible EU-specific theory of associative democratisation. This gap might be filled by looking at democratisation theories for national settings. This article discusses the scope of applicability for the EU environment of three of the most prominent normative conceptions of (deliberative) democracy (Christiano, Cohen/Rogers and Habermas), which in particular deal with associational involvement in national political systems. Their underlying empirical assumptions about the nature of associations, the political framework and so on are taken up and contrasted with the persistent empirical conditions in the EU. For different reasons, none of these models of associational involvement works properly at EU level and, thus, only a restricted vision of democratic associational involvement in EU decision making is viable. Notwithstanding, the EU political system is still far away from institutionalising even this modest vision.
European integration has added an extra dimension to the perceived crisis of contemporary democracy. Many observers argue that the allocation of decision-making powers beyond the nation state bears the risk of hollowing out the institutional mechanisms of democratic accountability. In EU governance, the Commission has emerged as a particularly active and imaginative actor promoting EU–society relations, and it has done so with the explicit desire to improve the democratic legitimacy of the EU. However, assumptions concerning the societal prerequisites of a working democracy differ with the normative theory of democracy employed. Therefore, expectations concerning the beneficial effect of institutional reforms such as the European Commission's new governance strategy, which was launched at the beginning of the century, vary according to normative standards set by different theories of democracy on the one hand and to the confidence in the malleability of society on the other. Our contribution seeks to pave a way for the systematic assessment of the democratic potential of the European Commission's consultation regime. To this purpose, two alternative theoretical conceptions that link participation to democracy will be presented. A list of criteria for both conceptions that enable us to empirically assess the democratic potential of the EU Commission's participatory strategy will then be presented.
This paper examines the public involvement in a particularly sensitive and highly contentious field of EU policy making: the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) sector. It argues for the establishment of a larger public debate in the EU policy field and interactive discourses that involve public voices, rather than just technocrats or scientists, in the GMO sector. In terms of deliberative democracy, an assessment of the EU's GMO regime is mixed: on the one hand, new practices have been introduced, which indicate a shift towards more participatory policy making; on the other, enhanced societal participation does not necessarily support the emergence of a larger engaged public and deliberation in the general public sphere. Thus, after the design of the ‘participatory garden’, the wider European public debate on GMOs has not ‘grown’ due to a lack of horizontal co-ordination among EU initiatives; the preference for institutionalized forms of cooperation with civil society; and the lack of evaluation methods for public involvement in GMO approvals.
In the European Union, for the first time, lay people can participate directly in the procedure of assessment of GMO (genetically modified organisms) products, an exercise normally reserved for scientists and legal experts. What makes this a unique strategy of participation is that for each single application for authorization, lay people have the opportunity to express their views. This article presents the result of the first in-depth analysis of this type of Internet participatory exercise in the first years of its implementation. It shows that, despite generally participatory technology assessment aims at deliberative consensus on technical questions, this forum is instead a way to expose the work of regulative authorities to public scrutiny and to express dissent and opposition to the European Commission policy on GMOs.
DFID's major advocacy activities focus on influencing agencies and governments to invest in infrastructure. However, it is hard to find concrete evidence of the contributions that advocacy makes towards poverty eradication. Here we provide guidelines for an approach that many NGOs take to assess advocacy impacts. Being clear about the changes you want to effect means that you can develop measurable advocacy objectives. Designing indicators that act as milestones towards the achievement of your objectives provides a basis in your search for evidence. There are different types of advocacy impacts, known as different dimensions of change, and we describe some indicators for the following dimensions: changes in policies and their implementation, private sector change, strengthening civil society, aiding democracy and improving the material situation of individuals. Participatory monitoring and evaluation asks the people being affected by a project whether it has made a difference. However, this is often more complex than standard evaluation systems and you need to be clear about the goals of the process and who should be involved. In order to assess impact, you need to know the existing situation prior to advocacy. This can be determined by identifying your target's Awareness, Knowledge, Attitudes and Behaviour (AKAB) on your issue, and progress can then be monitored by AKAB re-evaluation. Once you have the information, it needs to be analysed. Lessons can then be learned and evaluation results used to demonstrate that advocacy works.
Findet in den Online-Konsultationen der EU-Kommission (externe) Politikberatung im Sinne von policy advice statt? In Absetzung
von Lobbying wird zunächst ein Begriff (externer) Politikberatung entwickelt. Politikberatung liegt dann vor, wenn nicht-staatliche
Akteure (a) ihre Positionen argumentativ in den politischen Prozess einspeisen und sich dadurch (b) die Wissensverteilung
bei den beratenen Akteuren im Sinne von Pareto-Superiorität verbessert. Die formalen Rahmenbedingungen von Online-Konsultationen
der EU-Kommission werden dann als ein innovatives, demokratiekompatibles Instrument europäischer Politikberatung gewürdigt
und empirisch untersucht: Wer beteiligt sich? Welche Qualität haben die Stellungnahmen unterschiedlicher Akteurstypen? Wie
geht die Kommission mit den eingegangenen Positionen und Vorschlägen um?
Are the online consultations of the EU commission an instrument for policy advice? In contrast to lobbying, policy advice
from non-state actors takes place, if they (a) bring up their positions in a deliberative mode, and if this is (b) the cause
for a pareto-superior distribution of knowledge on the advised-side. The formal framework of the Commission’s online consultations
is appreciated as an innovative instrument of policy advice which is compatible with democratic aspirations. Three empirical
questions are raised: Who participates in these online consultations? What is the deliberative quality of the contributions
of different types of actors? How is the Commission dealing with the incoming positions and recommendations?
This paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the development of participation rights in Community administration from the early 1970's to the present day. Procedural rights can be divided into three categories, each of which is associated with a distinct phase in Community history and a particular set of institutional actors. The first set of rights, the right to a fair hearing when the Commission inflicts sanctions or other forms of hardship on individuals, first emerged in the 1970's in the context of competition proceedings and later in areas such as anti-dumping and structural funds. This phase was driven by the Court of Justice and an English, and to a lesser extent, German conception of the value of a fair hearing. The rise of transparency in the 1990's-- the requirement of openness in all Community institutions, including administration--marks the second stage. The drive for transparency was led by certain member countries with longstanding traditions of open government--the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden--as well as the European Parliament. The most recent phase in the development of process rights is the debate on whether and under what conditions, individuals, firms, and their associations, billed "civil society," should take part in Community legislative and rulemaking proceedings. The Commission and now the Convention on the Future of Europe have been the keenest proponents of giving citizens and their associations a right to participate in rulemaking and legislative proceedings. Civil society participation is then critically examined. Representation--not expertise or good management practices--is the only justification for allocating power, within the Community policymaking process, to individual citizens and their organizations. Yet there is no consensus in Europe, where republican, corporatist, and liberal traditions continue to flourish, on the legitimacy of representation outside of political parties and the electoral process
If Citizens have a Voice, Does the EU have Ears? Lessons from Recent Citizen Consultation Experiments for the European Union
- Christine Quittkat
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Social Movements and the European Interest Intermediation of Public Interest Groups: A Comparison'. Paper presented at the CONNEX Workshop 'Territorial and Functional Interest Representation in the EU
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Ruzza, C. (2008) 'Social Movements and the European Interest Intermediation of
Public Interest Groups: A Comparison'. Paper presented at the CONNEX Workshop 'Territorial and Functional Interest Representation in the EU', Mannheim
Centre for European Social Research (MZES), Mannheim University, 23 June.
Trade Unions from Post-Socialist Member States in EU
- J Kusznir
- H Pleines
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Civil Dialogue: Making It Work Better
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Neue Medien im Dienste der Demokratie? Der zivilgesellschaftliche Gewinn von Online-Konsultationen
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Conceptualizing Associational Involvement in EU Decision Making: Contributions from Contemporary Political Theory'. Paper presented at the symposium 'The Third Sector and Political Ideologies: Unpacking Relations between Organized Civil Society and the State
- T Hüller
Hüller, T. (2008a) 'Conceptualizing Associational Involvement in EU Decision
Making: Contributions from Contemporary Political Theory'. Paper presented at
the symposium 'The Third Sector and Political Ideologies: Unpacking Relations
between Organized Civil Society and the State', University of Kent at Canterbury,
26 April.
The Role of Civil Society Organisations in Written Consultation Processes: From the European Monitoring Centre to the European Fundamental Rights Agency (eds) Governance and Civil Society in the European Union
- E Bozzini
Bozzini, E. (2007) 'The Role of Civil Society Organisations in Written Consultation
Processes: From the European Monitoring Centre to the European Fundamental
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Society in the European Union, Volume 2: Exploring Policy Issues (Manchester:
Manchester University Press).
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- S Boucher
Boucher, S. (2008) If Citizens have a Voice, Does the EU have Ears? Lessons from
Recent Citizen Consultation Experiments for the European Union (Paris: Notre
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- Smismans
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