Participatory Democracy and Civil Society in the EU

Agenda-Setting and Institutionalisation

Kenneth A. Loparo, Luis Bouza Garcia

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349493647, 9781137436832
• eBook ISBN: 9781137436849
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is about both the symbolic and the real struggles for the control of the EU's agenda on participatory democracy in the last fifteen years. The book analyzes how civil society organizations contributed to an agenda which has implications for the regulation of interest groups to the institutions and for the democratic legitimacy of the EU.

1

The Contribution of Civil Society to Bridging the Gap with EU Citizens: Reviewing a Decade of Debate

Civil society and the legitimacy of the EU

The Europa web portal – the European Union’s official gateway on the Internet – contains a series of arguments aimed at convincing Europeans of the merits of the Lisbon Treaty. An entire section is entitled “A more democratic and transparent Europe”, and one of the central arguments is that the Treaty brings more participatory democracy via new mechanisms of interaction.¹ However, when one searches for the words “participatory democracy” in the Lisbon Treaty they are nowhere to be found. This anecdote tells us much about the EU’s agenda in this field. It conveys the way in which the EU has tried to regain legitimacy by complementing representative democracy with participatory tools. It also demonstrates the importance that political actors attach to the way in which they frame their discourses. Finally, the anecdote indicates changes in the agenda during the last years, when notions have appeared and disappeared at different times.

Questions about the democratic legitimacy of the EU have arisen since the troublesome ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. EU institutions have reacted to this by formulating the idea that the shortcomings of representative democracy at the supranational level could be tackled by creating stronger opportunities for citizens’ participation. Participation can take place in different venues and forms: from involvement in an emerging “European public sphere”, and the Europeanisation of civil society organisations involving citizens, to a stronger association of citizens and their organisations in the policymaking of the EU.

All these discourses have a distinct potential for legitimacy and their appropriateness has been thoroughly discussed. The evolution of this debate is related to that of the political scenario at EU level. Until the debate on the future of the EU (2000–2003) that – resulted in the Convention it was considered by some that the EU could not be legitimated by political will formation and political participation because several of the prerequisites for democracy are still lacking at EU level. As a consequence the EU should focus on producing successful policies that make it legitimate, thanks to the public goods which it produces (Scharpf 1999; Majone 2002; Moravcsik 2006). However, in the wake of the debate on the constitutionalisation of the EU (Habermas 2001; Weiler 2003) other authors argued the contrary: that the EU should be understood as a regular political system suffering from a democratic deficit problem which is related to its institutional design (Follesdal and Hix 2006). This approach assumes that input legitimacy problems are not irredeemable but are linked to the institutional set-up of the EU.

However, the rejection of the constitutional Treaty seems to have moved the debate beyond the issue of the EU’s democratic deficit to point out its legitimacy crisis, which encompasses the existence of an institutional democratic deficit and a structural lack of communication, trust and accountability (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2007; Bertoncini and Chopin 2010; Chopin 2010;). Recently, it has been pointed out that the EU is becoming increasingly politicised and contested (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Papadopoulos and Magnette 2010; De Wilde 2011), breaking the permissive consensus of public opinions on which European integration has rested since its inception (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970). In this sense it is less a matter of objective institutional design but of a subjective perception akin to Max Weber’s conception of legitimacy (de Castro Asarta 2011).

Additionally the consensus-prone nature of the EU integration process (Lijphart 1999, 7) has blurred traditional political frames (Eriksen 2000, 58–61). At EU level it is difficult to perceive and communicate a clear political framework beyond the traditional tension between member states’ preferences for more or less European integration. In this sense it is not surprising that contestation and EU politicisation have been mainly left to European federalists or emerged from generally Eurosceptic national political parties and grassroots movements (Hooghe and Marks 2009).

The paradox of the debate on the democratic deficit is well summarised by the fact that every increase in the powers of the European Parliament has been matched by a decrease in participation in European Parliament elections (Costa 2009). The paradox of the EU’s institutional discourse is that it has assumed the existence of a democratic legitimacy problem (European Commission 2001) but has tried to solve it through reforms focusing on the institutional system. For instance, the Laeken declaration’s mandate, which launched the European Convention, focused exclusively on the reform of EU institutions. The Constitution made the EU more democratic in several senses as it extended the powers of the European Parliament, reinforced national parliaments and recognised participatory democracy in the EU. However, this Treaty was rejected in referenda in two founding member states, the Netherlands and France. Voters may not have analysed the proposed text, but there is clear evidence that voters made up their minds according to their appraisal of European integration (Glencross and Tresschel 2011). This apparent contradiction illustrates well the insufficiency of institutional reforms to take account of a disconnected and increasingly politicised debate about the EU (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Papadopoulos and Magnette 2010; De Wilde 2011).

The EU has turned in the last decade towards civil society, with the expectation that civil society organisations can serve as the interface for and promoter of a larger public debate on EU issues. The notions of public sphere, deliberation and civil society are attractive to EU scholars and institutions because they are not necessarily but are historically linked to the nation state (Cohen and Arato 1992, 201), and can be the founding steps of a political community that is not bound to the state but is constructed by mutual recognition in a transnational public sphere (Kaldor 1995; Habermas 2000).The idea that consulting civil society contributes to the legitimacy of the EU has been built incrementally (Armstrong 2002; Sloat 2003; del Río Villar 2004; Greenwood 2007a; Kohler-Koch and Finke 2007; Pérez Solórzano-Borragán 2007; Saurugger 2010). This idea resonates with the requirement of Habermasian discourse ethics that “all the affected have an effective equality of chances to assume dialogue roles” (Cohen and Arato 1992, 348). This respects the EU’s diversity of cultural and political traditions without trying to build a unified demos (Nicolaïdis 2003; Weiler 2003); rather, it promotes equal access to actors who have interests at stake. The EU has developed relations with organised civil society as a proxy, fulfilling some of the functions of the public in a democracy (Greenwood 2011b, 201–202). The EU has opted for a neo-pluralist system, if necessary by engineering the organisation of some interests (Sánchez-Salgado 2007), where groups check and balance each other thus avoiding routine domination by any of them (Greenwood 2011b).

Civil society is a multifaceted concept, as different ways of thinking emphasise different dimensions. Kohler-Koch and Quittkat (2011) analyse four distinct conceptions of civil society: the representation of different voices and interests in society; the autonomous participation of organisations in the public sphere; the emergence of organisations that mediate between other spheres of society (market and state); and organisations orientated towards the public good. This book follows a decision by these authors in a recent book (Kohler-Koch and Quittkat 2013) to use the notion of organised civil society. Organised civil society is conceived here as voluntary organisations, distinct from those active in the state and the market which aim at influencing these spheres via their activism in the European segmented public sphere. The normative assumption here is that the political process in a democracy is fundamentally open, and that all interests affected by the policy process thus have to be accounted for and have an equal chance of having their concerns considered. It is also argued that this approach is better suited to analyse the reality of the EU political system and the way in which interests are organised. First of all it accounts for the above-mentioned multiplicity of access points and fundamental plurality of interests in the EU. It also acknowledges the difficulty of drawing a clear line between organisations advocating sectoral and general interests, and better suits the way in which the EU has defined civil society. It thus has a better analytical correspondence with the object that will be analysed (Kohler-Koch and Quittkat 2013, 8–9).

Advocates of participatory democracy highlight that stronger participation has effects not only at the level of the political system but can also have positive consequences for society in the broader sense (Monaghan 2012). Authors writing from a republican perspective consider participation as a way to re-establish a dialogue between the citizen and the community (Barber 2003). Others highlight the positive effects of participation in civil society for a democratic political culture, because of its education and socialisation functions (Pateman 1970; Van Ingen and Van der Meer 2009). Stronger participation is also deemed to facilitate the inclusion of socially excluded communities and to foster the accountability of elected officials (Parés and Resende 2009; Smith 2009). In a similar vein, the EU has raised expectations that European civil society can contribute to deliberation and empowerment of citizens (Armstrong 2002; Ruzza 2004, 177; Giorgi et al. 2006; Magnette 2006). Academic literature has generally seen the institutionalisation of civil society relations as a contribution to the legitimacy of the EU (De Schutter 2002; Joerges 2002; Fazi and Smith 2006; Eder and Trenz 2007; Greenwood 2011a). The expectation that civil society organisations can be the link between international and European governance arenas and ordinary citizens (Steffek and Nanz 2008; Steffek and Hahn 2010) relies on the expectation that the participation of civil society in policymaking arenas contributes to the emergence of an “artificial public sphere” (McLaverty 2002) that will be enlarged by the very presence of public discussion and deliberation (Eder and Trenz 2007).

However, it has to be asked through which mechanisms civil society makes citizens interested in the EU. Expectations that the participation of civil society can make the EU more legitimate have been matched by negative empirical evaluations. Mechanisms that create civil society involvement in EU policymaking have been associated with incentives to civil society organisations to concentrate on lobbying EU institutions rather than in building a grassroots European civil society or public opinion (Warleigh 2001). In a nutshell, it has been suggested that the political opportunity structure at EU level provides organisations with an incentive to lobby institutions rather than to mobilise their members in order to influence EU decisionmaking (Warleigh 2001; Sudbery 2003; Mahoney 2007; Kohler-Koch 2010b). Secondly, the EU’s civil society consultation model presents some weaknesses, as it overemphasises the production of outputs (Armstrong 2002; Curtin 2003) and the representativeness of organisations rather than activism in the public sphere (Greenwood and Halpin 2007; Kohler-Koch 2010). Finally, the professionalisation of these organisations (Halpin and McLaverty 2010, 59; Buth 2011) does not make them real promoters of a wider public sphere (Sudbery 2003; Maloney and Van Deth 2008). Furthermore, civil society has been mainly involved in institutional attempts to build a European sphere of communication via bureaucratic procedures (Bee 2010). Although these procedures may create opportunities for civil society to contribute to deliberation (Joerges 2002; Boucher 2007; Lindgren and Persson 2011), such deliberation may be too technical to facilitate citizens’ participation.

Civil society and the European public sphere

A rich literature has already analysed the role of civil society in the development of the European public sphere and its limits (François and Neveu 1999; Kaelble 2002; Chalmers 2003; Trenz and Eder 2004; Giorgi, Von Homeyer and Parsons 2006; Fossum and Schlesinger 2007; Bee and Bozzini 2010). Some historians and sociologists have considered that the notion of the public sphere could be applied at EU level without substantially modifying the focus on the long-term emergence of a common European public, as historically publics have emerged in new spheres of economic exchange and political power (Kaelble 2002; Delanty and Rumford 2005). However, Schlesinger and Deirdre (2000, 220–221) have suggested that a quest for a common European public is conducive to determinism about the inexistence of a European public sphere, as long as the media and the general public do not pay attention to the EU (see Ward 2002; Delanty and Rumford 2005; de Swaan 2007 for examples of such determinism). Furthermore, such a quest may neglect the study of emergent processes and marginalise the role of actors other than the media and the general public (Trenz 2010, 29; van de Steeg 2010, 35–36).

It is authors working on deliberation and deliberative democracy who have paid more attention to the role of civil society organisations in specialised consultative fora, by pointing out that by engaging in very intense information exchanges on specialised issues civil society organisations reach common answers with other groups (Joerges 2002; Chalmers 2003). Through these processes organisations start to perceive each other as co-participants in a common project. In this sense civil society organisations’ participation in policymaking contributes to the emergence of a European public, by reducing the distance between and enhancing cooperation and mutual learning among civil society organisations.

Other authors, in particular in the light of the Convention, have pointed out the importance of participation in policy exchanges as a form of self-determination, in the sense that they contribute to the shaping of the EU by participating in deliberative venues (Eriksen and Fossum 2000; Chalmers 2003; Magnette 2004; Fossum and Schlesinger 2007). Some authors have argued that such participation may contribute to the emergence of a European civic identity by focusing on issues of democracy in the EU (Warleigh 2003). Counter-intuitively, by pointing out the insufficient democratic credentials of the EU, civil society organisations contribute to the democratisation of EU integration by putting the issue on the public agenda (Trenz and Eder 2004; Eder and Trenz 2007, 178–179). Eder and Trenz consider that debates about the legitimacy of the EU in specialised fora, such as the consultations about the White Paper on Governance and the Convention, may become self-sustaining and contribute to the democratisation of the EU by spilling over into general debates. Here the term participation is stretched and applied more generally to consider how the presence of civil society in debates may extend to a wider public.

However, different criticisms can be made of this literature. The first is that it seems to identify interest in the EU with consensus about it, which cannot accommodate the turn towards politicisation of the EU (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Papadopoulos and Magnette 2010; De Wilde 2011). Secondly, it can be argued that more often than not debates in these spaces are about highly technical regulatory legislation, which is unlikely to spark the interest of the “ordinary citizen”. Finally, the most significant criticism is that this literature focuses on deliberation by elite actors without sufficiently focusing on how this deliberation spills over to the general public (Trenz and Eder 2004; Giorgi et al. 2006).

Other authors have thus focused on the ways in which organisations communicate about the EU. One way in which organisations foster public debates is via “outside lobbying”, The argument is that organisations which use the mobilisation of their members and supporters as a way of pursuing influence may contribute to the circulation of information about the EU. However empirical analysis finds that this is relatively rare among EU organisations (Monaghan 2007; Mahoney 2008a). However, the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), included within the participatory democracy article by the Convention, may revitalise this approach. That said, this mechanism will require an ability to mobilise members that more established organisations seem unlikely to possess. It may thus be more attractive for outsider and more Eurosceptic organisations, making them more prone to participate in EU politics (Bouza Garcia and Greenwood 2014). There are thus considerable differences between the emergent European public sphere and the notion of a unified public sphere (Schlesinger and Deirdre 2000). Most authors foresee the constitution of different publics alongside the institutions and policies of the EU rather than the emergence of a general European public (Schlesinger and Deirdre 2000; Giorgi, Von Homeyer and Parsons 2006; Eriksen 2007; Bozzini 2010). Cohen and Arato’s proposal of a theory of democratic legitimacy rooted in Habermas’ discourse ethics, requiring that “all the affected have an effective equality of chances to assume dialogue roles” (Cohen and Arato 1992, 348), seems thus particularly well suited to the EU’s diversity of cultural and political traditions (Nicolaïdis 2003) and its long-lasting tradition of stakeholder consultation (Kohler-Koch and Finke 2007).

Eriksen has suggested conceiving of the emergent European public sphere as a set of divided sociopolitical spaces in which the predominant actors differ (Eriksen 2007). He sees civil society organisations and expert fora (Zito 2001) as a segmented public intermediating between general publics, composed by individuals and media at the national level, and the official debates within the institutions, which are conceived as a strong public (Eriksen 2007). Ruzza (2004, 26–28) also points out the importance of designing a research strategy that takes into account the interrelated levels of governance. It is thus necessary to analyse the logic of each of these spaces, and it is particularly important to consider their interrelation and communication flows. Recently some authors have applied similar approaches in trying to analyse and map the entrepreneurship of different actors in the Europeanisation of public spheres (Trenz 2010). Generally speaking, contributions in Giorgi et al. (2006), Fossum and Schlesinger (2007), Kohler-Koch and Rittberger (2007) and Bee and Bozzini (2010) tend to see a much stronger activism among civil society organisations than in the media when it comes to linking different public spaces in the EU.

The question is whether the institutionalisation of dialogue with civil society and a relatively modest tool such as the ECI may contribute to reversing the critical remarks about the role of civil society in the public sphere. The expectation is that the institutionalisation of these new mechanisms may have a relevant effect on the actors’ strategies because of a convergence of expectations and norms and competition between different actors and forms of collective action. To start with the expectations and the norms, the enforcement of the Lisbon Treaty is a further step in the decade-long process that aims to turn ad hoc mechanisms for interaction with interest groups into democratic innovations that aim to legitimise the EU. Participation is increasingly becoming a norm that EU institutions and civil society have to comply with. In this sense the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Contribution of Civil Society to Bridging the Gap with EU Citizens: Reviewing a Decade of Debate
• 2  From the Regulation of Lobbies to Participatory Democracy: Agenda Setting and Civil Society in the EU
• 3  Interpretive Frames in the Agenda-Setting Process, 19972003
• 4  Networking and Alliances
• 5  Organised Civil Society and the Conventions Agenda
• 6  Influence on the Agenda and Field Effects
• 7  The Development of the Participatory Agenda in the Aftermath of the Convention (20032011): Consultation and Direct Participation
• 8  Assessing the Contribution of Participation to Legitimacy
• 9  A Decade of Debate on Participatory Democracy
• Annexes
• Notes
• References
• Index