Bailly, Jessy
[UCL]
The European Union (EU) has developed participatory and deliberative procedures since the 2000s. Scholarship has highlighted the biases of such experiences, which do not fit with democratic standards of citizen participation and deliberation, whether in terms of representativeness, weak and non-conflictual deliberation, without incidence on policies. This paper’s aim is to analyse whether these pitfalls can be found in the citizens’ panels of the Conference on the Future of Europe. This case study is valuable since it is an unprecedented experiment, in terms of its scale and the means deployed, its duration (1 year), the random selection of hundreds of citizens coming from 27 States, and the inter-institutional agreement of the Council of the EU, the Parliament and the Commission. The democratic quality of the citizens’ panel process is assessed on specific criteria mentioned in the literature and on the claims expressed by the COFOE organisers (inclusiveness, level of information, interactivity, openness, internal accountability).


Bibliographic reference |
Bailly, Jessy. The democratic quality of European Citizens’ panels. Conference on the Future of Europe . In: Cevipol Working Papers, Vol. 2023, no.1, p. 2-35 (2023) |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/284701 |