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Ten years after the introduction of participatory democracy as one of the democratic foundations of the European Union, this introductory chapter to "Citizen Participation in Democratic Europe" provides some theoretical background on the role citizens play, and should play, within the EU democratic system. As such, it offers a contribution about the place of citizen participation in the wider, ongoing debate about how to develop the EU’s democratic system in a post-pandemic Europe. It sets the scene for the subsequent chapters written, again, not only by academic scholars but also civil society advocates and practitioners from across Europe who experience on a daily basis the realities of EU citizen participation. Ultimately, this edited volume argues how Europe’s long-standing democracy challenge can be addressed through the emergence of a new model of EU citizen participation, and a set of democratic innovations emerging bottom-up across the continent. To do so, it offers a re-evaluation and systematisation of EU level citizen participation and its future development, which remains largely underexplored.

This article examines what difference – if any – the renewed EU Better Regulation Agenda has made for the EU Commission in terms of its own accountability and policy outcomes. Emboldened by the Spitzenkandidaten process – which established for the first time a link between the outcome of the EU elections and the presidency of the EU Commission –, the Juncker Commission emerged as the most political yet. To shrug off the label of technocratic institution – historically insulated from citizens’ preferences –, the new Commission asked EU citizens to judge its operation by its ability ‘to deliver solutions to the big issues that cannot be addressed by the Member States alone’. By embracing such a panem et circenses approach to EU democracy – as such not too dissimilar from the Santer’s and Barroso’s previous administrations – the Juncker Commission raised new expectations. This is true not only in terms of output legitimacy – which was meant to become the privileged benchmark against which to measure the Commission’s success –, but also in terms of its own democratic and political accountability vis-à-vis EU citizens. Indeed, although unintelligible to the many, the Spitzenkandidaten logic entails that EU citizens contributed for the first time with their vote to shape the political orientation of this Commission and – as a result – could hold it accountable. While the very notion of political accountability is foreign to the EU constitutional setting – as citizens don’t have the possibility to replace the Commission if this does not meet their hopes –, the Juncker Commission has strived to frame its mandate as if such an oversight existed. This article concludes that at the very same time the Juncker Commission has been striving to develop its own, autonomous democratic credentials, its choice to embrace a set of well-defined institutional mechanisms that reward expert judgment over political adjudication appears at odds with its newly-acquired political nature.

This paper provides a critical assessment of the realities of EU participatory democracy and offers a set of innovative democratic innovations capable of making the Union more responsive to public input. It argues that today’s limited effectiveness of citizen participation to EU decision-making is due to the design, nature and practice of those instruments more than to the inherent inability of citizens to participate. As such, it concludes, the democratizing potential of the EU participatory tool-box remains not only fundamentally misaligned with societal participatory expectations, but also largely untapped.The paper suggests that the time has come for the EU to create an enabling and collaborative political environment fostering citizen participation beyond elections. Such a space may give birth to alternative, unconventional forms of participation capable of channeling citizens’ pluralistic and increasingly chaotic input into the political conversation to bring citizens closer to our representatives and, moreover, doing so in-between elections and across countries. Thus, for instance, by centralising all public input in a one-stop-shop entailing the participation of all EU institutions, a European Question Time might crystallise and eventually connect the daily realities of Europeans with the day-to-day operation of their institutions. A European Democratic Jury of randomly selected citizens from all over the Union could further contribute to such an objective by ‘humanising’ the EU decision-making.While this participatory framework would not magically fix the European accountability deficit, it may compensate for that by making the system responsive to citizen-driven agenda-setting and monitoring and eventually making it more intelligible and accessible to the many.

The purpose of this legal memorandum is to provide advice to organisations and individuals interested in submitting a request for public access to documents under Regulation (EC) No 1049/01 (“Regulation 1049/01”) to the European Parliament for documents related to the spending of political groups covered by Budget Item 400 appropriations under Chapter 7. Requests for those documents may face rejection on grounds related to exceptions provided for in Regulation 1049/01, specifically those found in Articles 4(1)b, 4(2), and 4(3) pertaining to privacy and integrity of the individual, commercial interests, and institution’s decision-making process respectively. This legal memorandum addresses the applicability of those exceptions to the documents requested for potential use in a confirmatory request to be submitted to the European Parliament subsequent to the initial rejection in line with Article 7 of Regulation 1049/01. The memo also provides arguments for overcoming these exceptions in light of: 1) recent developments in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) relating to the privacy exception; and 2) the strict legal requirements for triggering the commercial interests and institutional decision-making exceptions. The last section of the memo is structured to provide draft responses to the denial of requests for documents and should be tailored to the specific situation in question.

Transparency is one of the fundamental norms that structure our contemporary individual, organizational and social lives. Its influence can be felt at all levels, and it provides, in particular, the normative foundation for the current explosion of accounting, audit and other visibility-based accountability structures. The emergence and rapid expansion of international organizations – that have played a central role in structuring transnational governance around a plethora of standards and audits – has been fundamental to the theorization and global diffusion of accountability regimes. In this paper, we undertake a conceptual genealogy of the powerful notion of transparency. Starting with its Enlightenment roots, we explore the multiple competing and conflicting mobilizations of the notion of transparency through time to liberate, to deliberate, to legitimize, to control, to structure or to govern. We then trace the transposition of these various historical trajectories into the transnational space. Beginning with the League of Nations, we follow the various mutations of transnational transparency up to its contemporary and profound neoliberal transformation. We show how transnational transparency has shifted from being a norm of emancipatory accountability, “exposing the few to the many”, to one of governing by “exposing the many to the few”.