Civil society and EU democracy: ‘astroturf’ representation?

Abstract

The growing uneasiness about the democratic deficit of the European Union (EU) has incited politicians and academics alike to look for remedies other than institutional reforms and giving more powers to the European Parliament. Strategies of ‘good governance’ shifted centre stage and the governance turn initiated a lively discourse on the democratic credentials of involving civil society. This article presents the changing views on the role of civil society in EU discourse. Al though the Commission and even the Constitutional Convention put high hopes on the legitimacy input of civil society, a representation discourse is conspicuously absent. The article introduces an analytical framework to assess the contributions and limitations of civil society to democratic representation in EU governance.

Keywords:

• Democratic deficit
• European civil society
• participatory governance
• representation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Dario Castiglione, Sandra Kröger, Rainer Schmalz-Bruns, Hans-Jörg Trenz, Albert Weale and the anonymous referees of this journal for their very helpful comments.

Notes

For a detailed account of the history of the White Paper see Sloat (2003); Michel (2008); Saurugger (2008).

See the papers published since 1997 in the series of the Working Papers of the Forward Studies Unit, in particular Lebessis and Paterson (2000) and De Schutter et al. (2001).

These were the additional mandates given to the working groups.

This was the thrust of the public and above all the academic criticism of the White Paper. Among the 260 written contributions received in the consultation process on the White Paper, 48 per cent of comments were on ‘better involvement’, whereas the call for ‘radical decentralization’ drew little attention. For the public reception see the Commission consultation report (Commission 2003: 34). The academic response is well documented in Joerges et al. (2001).

For the debate on and implementation of the Transparency Initiative see http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/eti/index_en.htm

See, above all, the report of the Peer Review Group on stakeholder Involvement established by DG SANCO (Commission 2007a) and the key recommendations in Healthy Democracy (Commission 2007b: 5).

In his response to an earlier version of this paper, see Trenz (2007).

This is the result of a survey among more than a hundred respondents from academia. The overwhelming majority (85 per cent) classified associations representing ‘general interests’ as CSOs; see Kohler-Koch and Quittkat (2009).

Pitkin (1967) has suggested five different senses of representation. Whereas she attributes little democratic value to symbolic representation and is critical of the authorization sense of representation, she elaborates on how the descriptive, substantive and accountability sense of representation add to democratic representation.

This corresponds to the self-ascription of the members of the Civil Society Contact Group. See http://www.act4europe.org/code/en/default.asp

In addition, when counting the sheer presence of CSOs in Brussels, a bias in favour of market-related groups still exists. On 1 July 2009, among the 1,647 interested representatives listed in the Commission's register, 101 were professional consultancies, 230 companies, 551 professional associations, 47 trade unions and 367 NGOs.

For further information on the UEAPME case see Lord and Pollak (2009).

For a more detailed account see Kohler-Koch (2009).