The European Citizens’ Initiative’s role in making the EU decision making more representative

The democratic deficit in the EU is difficult to completely overcome as long as its locus of policy-making stays to be so remote from and its decision making procedures so complex for ordinary citizens in the member countries. Improvement is possible though; one of the options to reach such improvement is by paying more attention to the question of political representation in the EU. Political representation in general is concerned with coming as closest as we can to achieving government by the people (Heywood, 2013, 196). There are two basic ideas about how best to guarantee that the legislative assemblies represent the plurality of interests, policy beliefs and goals of a constituency, such as the citizens of the EU: Geographic representation and demographic representation. In the idea of geographic representation the link between a representative and the geographical area he or she comes from is pivotal. Whereas in the demographic or descriptive representation ideal, representatives should share important social and economic characteristics with their constituents, such as social class, gender or ethnicity. The assumption is either that people who live on the same territory or people who share the same social and economic characteristics are best in mirroring each other’s interests, beliefs and preferences. Both ideas of representation are implemented in the ‘composite’ democracy of the European Union. The European Citizens’ Initiative, enacted from April 2012, is meant to be an instrument of institutional reform, in this case directed at making the bound between EU representatives and the EU citizens closer by allowing the latter to raise legislative proposals. In my paper I will firstly consider what groups or sections in the European community would have to be involved by the ECI in order to make the gap between the Brussels policy makers and ‘ordinary citizens’ of the member countries smaller; a combination of geographical and demographical criteria would have to be met by such groups. Subsequently, the question of whether and to what extent such groups indeed are involved in the European Citizens’ Initiatives registered up to this moment, will be answered. This will be done by tracing what country the initiators of these initiatives come from and to what groups or section of society they belong.