Ten Years of the ECI
– What Has Become of the New Tool of EU Participatory Democracy?
Copyright (c) 2022 Tárnok Balázs
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) has been available to EU citizens since 1 April 2012, marking the tenth anniversary of the new instrument of the participatory democracy in the European Union. A profound question to be asked at this milestone is what is the real nature of the ECI, what has become of it in the past ten years? Although both the relevant legislation and jurisprudence consider the ECI to be a tool for reducing the EU’s democratic deficit, given the practice of the past ten years, we consider it rather an advocacy tool to support specific interests of EU citizens. An important question in this approach is how effective the tool is in this quality and what are the factors that affect its effectiveness. In examining this, we consider three aspects: public awareness about the ECI, the definition of a “successful ECI”, and the added value of ECI given its costly nature. The article reviews the practice of the ECI in the past ten years in a theoretical approach, considering its role in the system of EU law and the formation of this role along its implementation.
Keywords:
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