Keywords: political participation, citizen engagement, civil society, public consultations, European Union

In liberal democracies, organized civil society plays an important role in mobilizing citizens to take action on issues they care about. At the EU level, civil society organizations (CSOs) facilitate citizen input into the EU policymaking process via public consultations. Article 11 of the Treaty on the European Union stipulates that the Commission consults citizens and civil society groups in all areas of Union action. While consultations are not new to the EU’s governance processes, their breadth, frequency, and user-friendliness have considerably increased with the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 and experienced a defining boost with the Better Regulation Agenda of 2015. In order to increase input legitimacy, the EU's stakeholder concept expanded beyond interest groups and organized civil society in general to also include members of the public, scientific and technical experts, thus underscoring the Commission's strong commitment to engaging with citizens, consulting as widely as possible, and making the consultation process more meaningful for individuals. In 2018, the OECD ranked the EU first among OECD countries in terms of its stakeholder engagement with organized civil society and individual citizens, a distinction reconfirmed in 2021.

In this study, we ask how and to what extent civil society and citizen participation in the EU public consultation process are affected by potentially challenging antidemocratic developments in EU member states in recent years: Euroscepticism and contested civic spaces. Using EU’s digital archives (e.g., the 'Have Your Say' platform), we compiled a dataset of all public consultations conducted between 2014 and 2021, drew a probability sample by randomly selecting nearly 400 open public consultations, and conducted a systematic content analysis of specific features of each consultation (e.g., its policy area, topic domain, amount of individual and organizational input, respondents’ countries of origin). Combining three datasets and using multilevel/hierarchical regression models, we seek to separate country-level from consultation-specific effects on citizen participation in various ways – vis-à-vis overall participation in consultation opportunities, and organizational responses to such consultations, with particular emphasis on NGO and for-profit sector participation.

At the country level, we utilize variation among member states in terms of (a) the robustness of their civil society and strength of participatory democracy (using various V-DEM measures, such as the ways in which people are involved in CSOs, the frequency with which CSOs are consulted on policies relevant to their members, and government's control entry and exit by CSOs into public life) as well as (b) the degree to which their publics harbor Eurosceptic beliefs (using various Eurobarometer measures). Additionally, for both dimensions, static (averaged) and dynamic (difference) measures are employed. Preliminary findings show that citizen responses to public consultations vary widely. Under conditions of Euroscepticism and contested civic spaces, civil society engagement with the EU consultation process tends to shrink while individual citizen participation might compensate for this decline. Implications for the EU’s engagement architecture and democratic model against the background of rising illiberalism and decreasing institutional trust are discussed.