Confronting Political Distrust Through Citizen Empowerment: A Citizen-Centered Approach to Democratic Innovations in the EU

Dr. Alienor Ballange is a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt and a member of the ConTrust: Trust in Conflict project. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Theory from Sciences Po Paris, where she studied the democratic theory of European integration. Her research explores the crisis of representative democracy in the EU, the relationship between trust and citizen empowerment, and transnational citizens’ assemblies. Her work has been published in Res Publica, Politique européenne, Raisons Politiques, and French Politics. 

Citation: Ballange, A. (2024). Confronting political distrust through citizen empowerment: A citizen-centered approach to democratic innovations in the EU. TRUEDEM Blog. https://www.truedem.eu/blog/blog9 

A few months before the launch of the Conference on the Future of Europe, which brought together 800 randomly selected EU citizens to deliberate on a range of topical issues, the Future of Europe 2020 Eurobarometer revealed that only 15% of EU citizens believed that participating in events such as citizens’ debates and citizens’ assemblies was a convincing way to ‘ensure that their voices are heard at EU level’. Similarly, Gerd, a German citizen I interviewed after the first session of the Conference on the Future of Europe panels, shared his skepticism about participatory democratic innovations: “Citizen participation is just fashion. I don’t really trust it. I think it’s a fake way out of the democracy problem”. Along with the above-mentioned Eurobarometer, Gerd’s skepticism points to something important that we should pay more attention to: Participation granted top-down by public officials to distrustful citizens is unlikely to restore trust in the democratic system if citizens aren’t willing to trust the democratic system that encourages citizen participation in the first place.

THE CHALLENGE OF DEMOCRATIC TRUST-BUILDING

This post aims to challenge the dominant instrumental view in the discourse on participatory and deliberative democracy. Advocates of this perspective argue that participatory democratic innovations should be expanded to increase citizens’ trust and ownership of institutions and elites (Geissel 2023), especially in a ‘society of generalized distrust’ (Rosanvallon 2010). However, this view misses a critical point: it overlooks the deeper, systemic causes of citizen distrust. How can citizens who increasingly distrust their democratic institutions and officials trust that these same institutions and officials are genuinely willing to give them more power and ownership in policymaking and decision-making? This is a conundrum that Gerd’s skeptical perspective highlights. If citizens lack trust in the sincerity of their elites’ intentions to share power, to respond to their needs and expectations, and to protect and defend their interests, it is difficult to imagine that these citizens will trust their elites’ intentions to seek their input in policymaking.

RETHINKING DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS

It follows from the above that the challenge for participatory democratic innovations should not be to create counterfactual arenas aimed at restoring trust in a society increasingly skeptical of democratic institutions. Rather, the real challenge is to address the post-democratic disconnect (Crouch 2004) between democratic ideals and their institutional practices, recognizing it as a cause rather than a consequence of citizens’ growing distrust of their institutions and elites. And it is precisely here that I see the greatest potential for democratic innovations, such as citizens’ assemblies (see also Hammond 2020). Democratic innovations should not be conceived as a means of restoring trust in a democratic facade. Rather, they should be designed to empower citizens beyond ‘tamed consultations’ (Courant 2022), that is, beyond institutionalized participatory processes in which participants’ input is controlled or shaped by established authorities. Only then can the nascent trust in democratic institutions and elites be restored, not as something actively sought, but as a result of democratic empowerment.

This Copernican revolution in the relationship between democratic empowerment and trust building should be initiated by what I propose to call a ‘citizen-centered’ approach to participatory democratic innovation. A citizen-centered approach involves a shift in focus from the goals of elites, such as the restoration of democratic legitimacy, to the benefits that citizens themselves can gain through the empowerment fostered by active participation (Rosanvallon 2010). Let me now substantiate this claim by illustrating how participatory democratic innovations have been experimented with by the EU, suggesting why they haven’t met with much popular support, and how a citizen-centered approach to European democratic innovationscould address some of the above shortcomings of the current experimental design.

THE ROAD TO CITIZEN EMPOWERMENT

Since the mid-2000s, the development of participatory and deliberative initiatives in the EU has been primarily aimed at narrowing the gap between EU institutions and citizens and promoting greater citizen involvement in EU decision-making processes (Alemanno & Nicolaïdis 2022; Boucher 2009; Stratulat et al 2022). The first participatory experiments at the EU level were organized by the European Commission in 2005 as part of the ‘Plan D for Democracy, Dialogue and Debate’ in the wake of the French and Dutch ‘no’ votes on the Constitutional Treaty (Bailly 2023). Two years later, J. S. Fishkin, who had theorized and experimented with the concept deliberative polling’ in the 1990s (Fishkin 2011), launched ‘Tomorrow’s Europe’, an enhanced public consultation exercise to capture what Europeans think ‘when they really think’ (Fishkin 2018). More recent initiatives, such as the Conference on the Future of Europe and specialized citizens’ panels on topics such as Food Waste (2023) or Energy Efficiency (2024) have continued this trend (Gjaldbæk-Sverdrup et al 2023). However, these initiatives have been criticized for merely taking the pulse of public opinion rather than giving EU citizens real influence over policy outcomes (Oleart 2023). During my ethnographic study of the Conference on the Future of Europe (Ballangé 2022), I observed a disconnect between the enthusiasm for these experiments among EU elites and the lukewarm reception among citizens themselves. Many of the citizens I interviewed at the time perceived these exercises as symbolic rather than substantive, and many felt that their participation didn’t translate into meaningful influence on policy. As one young French citizen told me a year after the Conference on the Future of Europe: “I went in with a lot of skepticism and I came out with a lot of skepticism. I'm skeptical about the way our current political system works, and it didn't change anything.”

This skepticism on the part of citizens, who are supposed to be the main beneficiaries of democratic innovations, should urgently be placed on the research agenda of EU studies and scholars specializing in participatory democracy. Based on the ubiquitous diagnosis of the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’, most scholars of the democratization of European governance still assume that EU citizens support citizens’ assemblies because these arenas would address their recurring criticism of insufficient participation (Abels et al 2022; Alemanno 2022). Consequently, when confronted with quantitative evidence of lukewarm popular support for participatory experiments (Pilet et al 2022), some scholars respond with a call for more and better citizens’ assemblies (Nicolaïdis 2024). However, this approach risks presuming to speak on behalf of citizens by assuming that more frequent use of randomly selected citizens’ assemblies is the best way to democratize European governance. If we do not first step back and ask what citizens expect from experiments aimed at ‘democratizing democracy’, we are likely to develop an ill-founded and paternalistic approach to democratic innovations in the EU. This runs the risk of backfiring if the proposals that academics – and the civil society organizations with which they are increasingly working – advocate turn out to be so out of touch with the needs and expectations of ordinary citizens that they fail to gain popular support.

DEVELOPING A CITIZEN-CENTERED APPROACH

Recognizing the danger of using democratic innovations to restore trust without first addressing the underlying causes of public distrust is the first step that a citizen-centered approach to participatory democracy takes. This critical moment (Hammond 2019) underscores the need to truly understand and address the reasons why citizens feel alienated from democratic processes.

The next phase is to step back from specific policy-oriented panels and organize a campaign of local deliberative assemblies across the EU, aimed at brainstorming with citizens about what they expect (and don’t expect) from the current proliferation of participatory democratic innovations. The idea of this meta-participatory campaign would be to put citizens at the center of democratic innovations, so that these initiatives are more in tune with their interests and needs, and thus better able to respond to their growing distrust of democratic elites and institutions. This constituent citizen assemblies dedicated to brainstorming on the possibilities and limits of participatory democratic innovations could lead to a set of rules and principles that would be summarized in a “participation contract” between the different actors involved in participatory experiments, anticipating and addressing potential shortcomings of these experiments, such as lack of transparency, impact and follow-up processes. This approach differs from current participatory and deliberative experiments by promoting collective engagement and ownership of democratic processes. It encourages continuous dialogue and feedback, allowing citizens to actively shape democratic innovations.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, there is momentum for a fundamental rethinking of how democratic innovations, such as EU citizens’ assemblies, are conceived in the context of growing political distrust. Rather than viewing these participatory mechanisms as a top-down tool for restoring citizens’ trust in elites, a more sustainable and effective approach is to focus on how these innovations can empower citizens.

This shift from an elite-centered to a citizen-centered perspective recognizes that true democratic legitimacy comes from meaningful engagement that addresses citizens’ concerns and frustrations with current institutional structures. By fostering empowerment and critical engagement, participatory democracy has the potential to rebuild trust as a by-product of genuine citizen participation rather than as an instrumental goal.