The ECI as a Democratic Innovation: Analysing its Ability to Promote Inclusion, Empowerment and Responsiveness in European Civil Society

Abstract This article analyses the effect of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) in the EU's participatory model. It considers first its origins in the process of participation of civil society in the Convention to point out the importance of considering the debates on participation in the last decade. It then builds on the expectations of other papers in this special issue that the main users of the ECI will be a constituency of civil society organisations so far weakly involved in European affairs and focuses mainly on the ECI's innovative effects on the relations between the European institutions and organised civil society. The article analyses whether the ECI may make the EU participatory model more inclusive, empowering and more oriented towards the public sphere than it has been so far. It finds that the ECI may make European civil society more diverse, representative and oriented to the public sphere, although it is not clear that the initiative grants them a more salient role. In this sense the financial, organisational and political costs associated to the initiative seem more important than the potential gains it offers, although it is also expected that the ECI will become a sufficiently salient tool in political terms to be neglected by the EU institutions.