EUROGOV
No. C-08-02
Laurie Boussaguet and Renaud Dehousse
Lay people’s Europe: A Critical Assessment of the
First EU Citizens’ Conferences
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Published: July 21, 2008
Abstract
Citizens’ conferences attempt to include citizens in
the decisional and political process. Created to foster deliberation
and public debate on disputed issues, they place ordinary
citizens in the spotlight and ask them to express their views,
after having debated the issues with specialists. Whereas
the conferences conducted in a domestic context have been
well analyzed, little attention has been given so far to the
first attempts to replicate the experience at the European
level, and to the specific problems that may be encountered
in so doing. Two main reasons have prompted the EU to pay
interest to this participatory mechanism: functional reasons
(the need to take position on a socio-technological controversy
whose stakes are controversial) and political legitimacy (the
absence of a strong democratic legitimacy at the EU level).
Based on an analysis of the first two experiments organized
in the EU, devoted to “the city of tomorrow” and
to brain sciences respectively, this article argues that achieving
such citizen deliberation is not without problems. In many
respects, these problems point to the difficulty entailed
in the creation of a European public space: the elusive quest
for a “European people”; the question of representation
according to the size of the countries; the issue of languages.
At the same time, the main potential of this instrument may
lie in its cognitive impact, since the interpretations and
knowledge surrounding the issues which are debate may influence
both the agenda-setting and the decision-making process.
Keywords:
participation, deliberative democracy, policy analysis, European
public sphere
Laurie Boussaguet
– Sciences Po
e-mail: laurie.boussaguet@sciences-po.org
Renaud Dehousse – Sciences
Po
e-mail: renaud.dehousse@sciences-po.fr
© 2008 Laurie Boussaguet
and Renaud Dehousse
Citing this EUROGOV
paper:
Boussaguet, Laurie, and Renaud Dehousse. 2008. Lay
people’s Europe: A Critical Assessment of the First
EU Citizens’ Conferences. European Governance
Papers (EUROGOV) No. C-08-02,
http://www.connex-network.org/eurogov/pdf/egp-connex-C-08-02.pdf.
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