Towards a (new) Democratic Interface

• Florence School of Transnational Governance
• TD21 - Trasnational Democracy in the 21st century

The aim of this roundtable is to gather academics and practitioners working on EU democracy to critically discuss the EU participatory turn and its reconnection with representative democracy on the basis of new empirical data and different methodological perspectives.

One of the remedies to the ongoing crisis of representative democracy manifested by decreasing trust in representative institutions, populist electoral gains and widespread citizens’ dissatisfaction with democratic systems is the expansion of citizen-oriented participatory tools such as deliberative mini publics or citizens panels. At the EU level, the ‘citizen turn’ materialised most spectacularly through the transnational experiment of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) taking place between 2021-2022, which became a model for the subsequent new generation citizens’ panels launched by the European Commission. While such solutions undoubtedly add new energy to the EU democratic life, their genuine impact on the overall quality of the EU democratic governance and its multi-level legitimacy remains unexplored. The crucial question is how the new participatory instruments link back to the representative (parliamentary and executive) dimension and how to connect one to the other in a complementary way so that the decision-making and citizen dimensions of EU democracy communicate, interact, form common agendas and make collective decisions.

The discussion will be based on the following contributions:

·      More Participation, More Trust in EU Institutions? Insights from the EU-led Conference on the Future of Europe (Daniela Heimpel)

·      Parliamentary discursive stances towards citizens participation in EU policy-making: a transnational perspective (Karolina Boronska-Hryniewiecka)

·      From depoliticization to empowering dissensus: the potential of participatory innovations to foster inclusive politicization of the EU (Jan Kotýnek Krotký)