Democracy at Stake: Multipositional Actors and Politicization in the EU Civil Society Field

Alvaro Oleart and Luis Bouza

ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) has the potential to significantly change the dynamics of interaction between EU institutions and civil society, which we conceive as a field. This article analyzes how the EU civil society field has been re-shaped by the ECI, the creation of networks and relationships between EU and national organizations and the effects of politicization. Using interview data and online documents from five ECI cases, we argue that an ECI can potentially transform the meta-field of civil society and democracy by altering what is at stake. We show that the five cases compete in a single field of civil society in the EU where incumbent organizations react to challenges. However, the field cannot be characterized in terms of a competition between insiders and outsiders. Rather, the ECI favours actors able to combine activism in different spheres – which we call multi-positional actors.

Keywords: civil society; European citizens’ initiative; European Union; lobbying; participatory democracy; politicization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-05
Note: SCOPUS: ar.j
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in: Journal of common market studies (2018) v.56 n° 4,p.870-887

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/273672/3/Stake.pdf Full text for the whole work, or for a work part (application/pdf)

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:ulb:ulbeco:2013/273672

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... lb.ac.be:2013/273672

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().