Combining Inclusion with Impact on the Decision? ; Combining Inclusion with Impact on the Decision?: The Commission's Online Consultation on the European Citizen's Initiative

Abstract

The Lisbon Treaty introduces a new form of participation at the European level: the Citizens' initiative, which allows one million citizens who fulfill a petition to call on the Commission to propose a legal act on a specific issue. Before this right came into force in April 2012, the European Commission ran a consultation, from November 2009 to January 2010, in order to define the procedure and the conditions required for such initiatives to work in practice. This consultation was hosted on the portal Your Voice in Europe, a website which has been used since the early 2000s by the Directorates-General in order to allow stakeholders to contribute to the drafting of legal acts. In comparison to most of online participative experiences at the EU level, Your Voice in Europe differs in several respects. It is rather a policy instrument that an e-participation tool: it is institutionalized and the consultations carried out on the platform have to respect strict rules. The link between the consultations and the legislative process is, if not binding, at least defined legally: the consultations have thus "potentially" a strong impact on the decision. Lastly, the platform does not provide any discursive area where participants could exchange and build common proposals. This implies that it does not foster the emergence of European publics around key issues, and neither does it promote a transnational political identity, as most e-participation experiences attempt to do. This case study is thus useful to evaluate to what extent a policy instrument that is open to the general public can promote the participation of "ordinary" citizens. In order to measure this link we will first focus on the impact of the consultation on the final decision, by assessing the features that enable the participants to be heard by the Commission. We will argue that the strategy of the consultation managers can be more decisive than the legal status of the mechanism. We will then focus on the inclusion issue: what are the conditions that must ...