The European Commission’s Online Consultations: the Contribution of a New Participations Tool to Overcome the EU’s Lacking Legitimacy

Not only the ‘euro crisis‘ and the debate on a (more or less) common refugee policy has the European Union as a whole and particularly the European Commission searching for new democratic legitimisation of their decisions. However, the EU’s multiple crises have intensified this debate a great deal. Since the beginning of the new millennium, the Commission has increasingly used online consultations as a new and innovative tool for more participation, especially against the background of the White Paper on Governance published in 2001. A few years later in 2004, the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, stressed the significance of consultations under article I-47, which was titled “The Principle of participatory democracy” and additionally established the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). These instruments are now codified in Art. 11 TEU. Both the White Paper and the complementation of representative democracy by the “principle of participatory democracy” in the constitutional treaty, were meant to help resolve the much-discussed democratic deficit of the EU by improving the inputand output-legitimacy of European decision-making process. This article is a discussion of the European Commission’s treatment of online consultations (based on own perennial empirical research and in-depth-analysis of selected case examples of different consultations). They will be discussed and theoretically categorised against the backdrop of theories of participatory democracy and participatory governance, ultimately in order to evaluate their (possible) contribution to the democratisation of the European Union