Civil Society Organizations’ Participation in the EU and Its Challenges for Democratic Representation

Nicolle Zeegers
Additional contact information
Nicolle Zeegers: Faculty of Law, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Politics and Governance, 2016, vol. 4, issue 4, 27-39

Abstract: Online consultations and the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) are tools that have been put into place by the European Union (EU) in order to increase the participation of citizens and Civil Society Organizations (CSO) in its politics and policy making. The current CSO representation at the system level of the EU is claimed to be biased in favor of the interests of economic producers and CSOs coming from old member states. The central question of this article is whether these tools help make participation more representative of the diversity of societal groups within the EU. The concept of ‘actor representativeness’ as well as ‘discourse representativeness’ will be applied in order to answer this question.

Keywords: actor representativeness; civil society organization; discourse representativeness; European Citizens’ Initiative; European Union; online consultations; participatory democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/782 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v4:y:2016:i:4:p:27-39

DOI: 10.17645/pag.v4i4.782

Access Statistics for this article

Politics and Governance is currently edited by Carolina Correia

More articles in Politics and Governance from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().