If citizens have a voice, who’s listening?

This is the paper for the class of "EU Politics", Monday, 9 nov. 200

Deliberative Democracy in the EU. Countering Populism with Participation and Debate. CEPS Paperback

Elections are the preferred way to freely transfer power from one term to the next and from one political party or coalition to another. They are an essential element of democracy. But if the process of power transfer is corrupted, democracy risks collapse. Reliance on voters, civil society organisations and neutral observers to fully exercise their freedoms as laid down in international human rights conventions is an integral part of holding democratic elections. Without free, fair and regular elections, liberal democracy is inconceivable. Elections are no guarantee that democracy will take root and hold, however. If the history of political participation in Europe over the past 800 years is anything to go by, successful attempts at gaining voice have been patchy, while leaders’ attempts to silence these voices and consolidate their own power have been almost constant (Blockmans, 2020). Recent developments in certain EU member states have again shown us that democratically elected leaders will try and use majoritarian rule to curb freedoms, overstep the constitutional limits of their powers, protect the interests of their cronies and recycle themselves through seemingly free and fair elections. In their recent book How Democracies Die, two Harvard professors of politics write: “Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018)

If citizens have a voice, who's listening? Lessons from recent citizen consultation experiments for the European Union. CEPS EPIN Working Paper No. 24, 12 June 2009

Are European Union institutions, as they claim, really listening to citizens thanks to more ‘deliberative’ consultation tools? The European Commission and the European Parliament in particular have committed themselves to engaging in a dialogue with citizens in recent years. But to what effect? This paper notes how official policies have adopted language borrowed from the deliberative democracy school of thinking, but denounces the lack of clarity in the role assigned to deliberation with citizens in EU policy-making processes. It also invites EU policy-makers to think more critically about recent and future experiments that present themselves as ‘deliberative’. It does so by highlighting areas for improvement in recent initiatives. Finally, it makes a number of recommendations for the future of dialogue with citizens, suggesting in particular the creation of a European Observatory for Democracy and Opinion, as well as a list of criteria to assess the design and role of such activities, and the concentration of efforts on one high-quality, high-impact initiative per year

European Arctic Initiatives Compendium

Julkaistu versi

Learning cities 2020

This article provides a brief overview of historic work in the field of Learning City development. It then proceeds to highlight two contemporary strands of work. The first is the initiative of UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) in establishing the International Platform of Learning Cities. The second is the work of the PASCAL Observatory, currently manifested in the Learning Cities 2020 programme