Like other governmental and intergovernmental organizations, the European Union has taken in the 1990s a participatory turn in its decision-making and communication policy, introducing organized procedures of deliberation, participation, and recruiting non-institutional actors in the decision-making process of public executives. The official introduction of the “new European governance” in 2001 sought to find a lasting institutional solution to the problem of controlling interactions among European policymakers, experts, and representatives of interest. The failure of the ratification referendum of the Constitutional Treaty in 2005 opened a new window of opportunity. It seemed necessary for the European institutions to forget the “neo-corporatist” model of the governance by developing the direct participation of citizens in decision-making processes. Based on empirical work launched in 2005, the paper analyse the (political and intellectual) genesis as well as the structure of opportunity of what is here called an institutional participationism intended to re-activate and better enact a fundamental European value: democracy. The authors explore the European reform laboratories (often close to Universities), where this new procedural theory of the European power has been imagined and framed. The paper traces the institutionalization of these European participatory values by following its genealogy from the White Paper on Governance to the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). The authors focus in particular on the role played by social scientists as experts in these democratic innovations.
