As the European Union undergoes a major, self-proclaimed democratic exercise the Conference on the Future of Europe and approaches Treaty change, this volume offers a new model of citizen participation to address Europe's long-standing democracy challenge, and respond to the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Proposed are a set of democratic innovations, ranging from citizens assemblies to regulatory gaming to citizens initiatives and lobbying, which are complementary, not antagonistic, to existing representative democracy across the European continent. These innovations are emerging bottom-up across the continent and getting traction at local, national and EU level in a new era powered by technology. This book brings together academics as well as practitioners to give a forward-looking, holistic view of the realities of EU citizen participation across the spectrum of participatory opportunities. They all converge in arguing that, after many years of proven experimentation, the EU must institutionalize supranational, participative and deliberative, democratic channels to complement representative democracy and each other, and ultimately improve the effectiveness of EU citizen participation. While this institutional approach will not magically treat the EU democratic malaise, it should make the system more intelligible, accessible, and ultimately responsive to citizen demand without necessarily undertaking Treaty reform. The attempt to harness citizen participation to help address the current EU crisis needs the type of multi-faceted approach presented in this book. One that recognises the potential of existing and new democratic mechanisms, and also, importantly, the links between different instruments of citizen participation to improve the overall quality of EU's democratic system

The dilemma of democracy arises from two contrasting trends. More people in the established democracies are participating in civil society activity, contacting government officials, protesting, and using online activism and other creative forms of participation. At the same time, the importance of social status as an influence on political activity is increasing. The democratic principle of the equality of voice is eroding. The politically rich are getting richer-and the politically needy have less voice. This book assembles an unprecedented set of international public opinion surveys to identify the individual, institutional, and political factors that produce these trends. New forms of activity place greater demands on participants, raising the importance of social status skills and resources. Civil society activity further widens the participation gap. New norms of citizenship shift how people participate. And generational change and new online forms of activism accentuate this process. Effective and representative government requires a participatory citizenry and equal voice, and participation trends are undermining these outcomes. The Participation Gap both documents the growing participation gap in contemporary democracies and suggests ways that we can better achieve their theoretical ideal of a participatory citizenry and equal voice.

How does the dominant understanding(s) of the demo(i)cratic subject in the EU, and of democracy more broadly, shape the EU’s democratic innovations on ‘citizen participation’? What are the politically and normatively preferable alternatives, both in terms of the conceptualisation of the democratic subject in the EU and in the ensuing political practices? The book addresses these questions combining a political theory with a political sociology perspective, contrasting the ‘democracy without politics’ approach of the EU in the context of the Conference on the Future of Europe with that of ongoing transnational activist processes. In doing so, it develops an agonistic alternative to ‘the people(s)’ as the political imaginary of democracy in the EU, which is based on the idea of the ‘decolonial multitude’. Thus, the book puts forward a diagnosis of current debates on EU democratic legitimacy as well as proposing an alternative.

Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens' Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues.

The decline of citizen involvement affects two key elements of democratic government: elections and political parties. Activating the Citizen examines the reasons underlying citizen withdrawal and explores and assesses innovative approaches on both sides of the Atlantic to try to counter these phenomena.

Analysing the historical circumstances and theoretical sources that have generated ideas about citizen and community participation in crime control, this book examines the various ideals, outcomes and effects that citizen participation has been held to stimulate and how these have been transformed, renegotiated and reinvigorated over time.

This book defends the value of democratic participation. It aims to improve citizens' democratic control and vindicate the value of citizens' participation against conceptions that threaten to undermine it.

From small-scale experiments, deliberative mini-publics have recently taken a constitutional turn in Europe. Iceland and Ireland have turned to deliberative democracy to reform their constitutions. Estonia, Luxembourg and Romania have also experienced constitutional process in a deliberative mode. In Belgium the G1000, a citizen-led initiative of deliberative democracy, has fostered a wider societal debate about the role and place of citizens in the country's democracy. At the same time, European institutions have introduced different forms of deliberative democracy as a way to connect citizens back in. These empirical cases are emblematic of a possibly constitutional turn in deliberative democracy in Europe. The purpose of this book is to critically assess these developments, bringing together academics involved in the designing of these news forms of constitutional deliberative democracy with the theorists who propagated the ideas and evaluated democratic standards.

The European Union is grappling with a democracy problem. The succession of crises which have plagued the increasingly executive EU for years, has led to a rising cacophony of voices calling for fundamental change to the integration project. Yet despite the seismic shock of the Brexit referendum and the electoral upsets by nativist parties across the continent, few of the plans for EU reform include concrete proposals to reduce the age-old democratic deficit. This book is concerned with the two-pronged question of how the relationship between citizens, the state and EU institutions has changed, and how direct democratic participation can be improved in a multi-layered Union. As such, this edited volume focuses not on populism per se, nor does it deeply engage with policy and output legitimacy. Rather, the research is concerned with process and polity. Building on the notion of increasing social, economic and political interdependence across borders, this volume asks how a sense of solidarity and European identity can be rescued from the bottom up by politically empowering citizens to ‘take back control’ of their EU.

Voter turnout was unusually high in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. At first glance, that level of participation—largely spurred by war in Iraq and a burgeoning culture war at home—might look like vindication of democracy. If the recent past is any indication, however, too many Americans will soon return to apathy and inactivity. Clearly, all is not well in our civic life. Citizens are participating in public affairs too infrequently, too unequally, and in too few venues to develop and sustain a robust democracy. This important new book explores the problem of America's decreasing involvement in its own affairs. D emocracy at Risk reveals the dangers of civic disengagement for the future of representative democracy. The authors, all eminent scholars, undertake three main tasks: documenting recent trends in civic engagement, exploring the influence that the design of political institutions and public policies have had on those trends, and recommending steps that will increase the amount and quality of civic engagement in America. The authors focus their attention on three key areas: the electoral process, including elections and the way people get involved; the impact of location, including demographic shifts and changing development patterns; and the critical role of nonprofit organizations and voluntary associations, including the philanthropy that help keep them going. This important project, initially sponsored by the American Political Science Association, tests the proposition that social science has useful insights on the state of our democratic life. Most importantly, it charts a course for reinvigorating civic participation in the world's oldest democracy. The authors: Stephen Macedo (Princeton University), Yvette Alex-Assensoh (Indiana University), Jeffrey M. Berry (Tufts), Michael Brintnall (American Political Science Association), David E. Campbell (Notre Dame), Luis Ricardo Fraga (Stanford), Archon Fung (Harvard), William