From Civil Dialogue to Participatory Democracy: The Role of Civil Society Organisations in Shaping the Agenda in the Debates on the European Constitution

• Main Author: Luis Bouza Garcia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: UACES 2010-05-01
• Series: Journal of Contemporary European Research
• Subjects: Civil society; Participatory democracy; European Convention; European Constitution; Public sphere
• Online Access: http://jcer.net/index.php/jcer/article/view/202/193

This article, based on ongoing research, explores the role of civil society organisations in the debate about participatory democracy in the European Constitution (TCE). The findings are based on the qualitative analysis of position papers and interviews in order to determine the ways in which civil society organisations contributed to shaping the model of participatory democracy (article 47 TCE). The article focuses on the debate on the role of civil society for democracy in the EU (Greenwood 2007b; Kohler-Koch 2007; Maloney and Van Deth 2008), by addressing its ability in fostering citizens’ participation. It considers firstly the place of civil society in the European public sphere. It then presents the role of civil society in shaping the agenda on participatory democracy before the debate on the European constitution. It particularly investigates the formation of coalitions of organisations which aimed to include these debates in the Convention’s agenda. It considers that although the Convention’s structure could have been appropriate for coalitions to voice demands from the general public, which is one of the expected functions for coalitions in the literature (Mahoney 2007: 375), this was not the case both because of the inability of European civil society organisations to mobilise the public and the high efficiency of insider strategies.