University of Bristol Law School

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Citizen Lobbying: A EU Perspective on Democracy Beyond Elections

Alberto Alemanno

There is a widespread, intensifying belief that without a greater involvement of citizens the EU is condemned to fail. While this realization is far from being new – having accompanied the EU integration process since at least 1992 -, recent events such as the Greek euro crisis, the migration crisis, the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the rising tide of anti-establishment, populist and often nationalist forces have further galvanized such a belief. Yet despite renewed, countless calls for the need to radically reform the EU machinery by EU leaders, little is expected to change. The 2017 White Paper on the Future of Europe is dramatically silent on the issue. This situation calls for a re-assessment of the role that EU citizens can – and should – play in the daily operation of EU policymaking.

Let’s start from a few facts.

First, EU citizens’ literacy is modest: 63% of EU citizens have little or no knowledge of their EU rights and, as a result, their engagement remains limited. Second, the absence of a EU publish sphere condemns EU citizens to be exposed exclusively to domestic accounts of EU developments that are inevitably partial, and often misinformed. Third, the dominant narrative depicts the EU governance as that of an opaque and technocratic process dominated by EU and domestic civil servants working in closed policy networks animated by a narrow community of Brussels-based civil society organisations detached from their members. Yet, in the aftermath of the EU turn to participatory democracy (Article 11 TUE), serious steps were taken – and progress made – to address the alleged EU deficit. Today the EU Commission subjects all its initiatives to public consultations, the EP streams virtually all parliamentary sessions, voting in the Council of the EU is public and the EU public administration, being subject to the oversight of the EU Ombudsman, is largely accountable and transparent to its citizens. As a result, the daily operation of the EU institutional machinery is – in average – more open and accountable to that of most EU member states. Yet transparency obligations only seldom translate into pro-active disclosure, informal procedures such a trilogues persist and participatory channels – including the European Citizen Initiative – remain embarrassingly underused by the large majority of citizens. Paradoxically, the major beneficiaries of the EU policymaking’s progressive opening and the multiplication of participatory opportunities are not EU citizens, but euro-specialists – be they business (who represent 75% of yearly lobbying meetings) or civil society interests. Limited participation literacy, little incentives to engage in public life and the virtually inexistent discursive nature of the EU participatory mechanisms are generally adduced as the major culprits of their own failure. While these obstacles to effective and meaningful participation are not specific to the EU, they are particularly arduous to overcome in its constitutional and socio-political multi-layered reality.

In these circumstances, no matter how well the participatory mechanisms are designed, they will never involve a critical mass of ‘ordinary citizens’.

How to break this impasse? How to reverse this trend?

At a time in which a rhetoric of open government is emerging - largely spurred by digital practices - and occupying many contemporary social, cultural and political spaces, we are living in a more participatory culture. As witnessed by a quick glance at a Facebook wall and online petition platforms, this means that an increasing number of citizens, and their groups, possess the communicative abilities to participate, meaningfully contribute and co-create contents. Yet this set of participatory skills, norms, and networks have not yet been transferred to institutional political practice. For this to happen we need to tap into the value of imaginative, emotional intelligence, citizenship and promote the use of existing participatory avenues, both at the institutional and citizen level.

As stated by the Institute for the Future

‘any democracy requires a thriving public imagination, in order to make visible, sharable and understandable to all the people new ideas, new models, new potential policies’ .

Public imagination can be seen as a process that by mobilizing existing individual resources, such as individual talents, and collective resources, such as images from popular culture, is capable to spark empowering, meaningful and pleasurable participation. This process entails the creation of new genres of public participation, a new repertoire for civic action through a more frequent and creative use of available institutional channels.

Evidence suggests that citizens who engage into ‘participatory politics’ tend to more active via conventional political channels . Moreover, societies that enable citizens to be assertive and critical of public authorities tend to have governments that are more effective and accountable. As they argue, governments are like waiters in a noisy restaurant: to get their attention you have to speak up. But to call a waiter you need to gain first a seat at the table!

It is against this backdrop that my book Lobbying for Change argues that to win the citizen’s challenge in the EU we need to foster a participatory culture by promoting the use of the existing avenues of participation. That is what I provocatively call citizen lobbying. A citizen lobbyist is someone who, in the absence of remuneration, participates to the policy process by tapping into her own skills, talents and expertise as well as in the repertoire of various, rapidly adapting lobbying techniques within existing participatory channels. Those include monitoring the decision-makers, writing to them, petitioning (e.g. EP petition system), agenda-setting (e.g. ECI), consultation (e.g. Lighten the Load Stakeholder Input Tool), and campaigning (e.g. informal petition platforms). A citizen lobbyist may fill up the participatory vacuum existing between the elected representatives and their electorate in between elections.

Citizen lobbying’s major contributions to democratic life are the following:

- to allow citizens who hold political power (understood as sovereignty) to monitor those who are delegated such political power via democratic oversight (accountability);
- to improve citizens’ civic literacy by providing them with the opportunity to gain a direct exposure to policymaking via its participatory avenues (pedagogical);
- to empower citizens to counter the undue influence by actors who tend to be overrepresented in the policy process. It may thus act as antidote to unequal representation of interests (equality);
- to induce ownership and therefore acceptance of policy output by entailing greater participation by citizens in the policy process (throughput and output legitimacy);
- to mobilize citizens’ talents and expertise and bring them into the policy process (civic engagement and inclusiveness).

Seen from this perspective, citizens lobbying emerges as a plausible, yet largely unnoticed, forms of civic participation that complements rather than antagonizing representative democracy in the EU. Yet similarly to participatory democracy it prods citizens to proactively engage with their elected representatives as well as their policy and political agendas in between and beyond elections.

My work provides a first conceptualization of citizen lobbying within the EU democratic space.

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