13. Options for Improving e-Participation at the EU Level

A major challenge to e-participation at the European level is language. With 24 official languages, translation is a major element of the running costs of the EU. Several of the European-level cases address this in different ways (Part II). The institutionalized mechanisms range from relying on English as a working language to full translation of all major content into all official languages. Your Voice in Europe clearly privileges English speakers by treating English as a de facto lingua franca. The platform provides all consultations in English and only a few additionally in one or more of the major languages (German, French, Italian, Spanish). Written contributions are accepted in all official EU languages. But with the English-only availability of core information, such as the questions to be answered, the platform has a clear choice built-in that decisively shapes a priori the demographic of possible participants. The European Citizen Initiative (ECI) strikes a middle ground. The platform provides all information about the mechanism in all official languages. The platform also accepts initiatives written in all official languages. Translation into other languages was previously the sole responsibility of the initiator, but with a new agreement reached in December 2018, initiators will now also be able to ask for help from volunteer supporters contributing through an online collaboration platform.¹ The previous system clearly favoured well-organized campaigns over more loosely affiliated individual citizens as initiators. With the addition of the collaboration platform, one can hope that individual citizens and small groups will be better able to be heard as others volunteer their resources. The European Parliament’s Petitions Portal is clearly the most multilingual of the institutionalized mechanisms. The portal allows submission of petitions in all official EU languages, and summaries of the petitions are translated into all official languages and made available to the public. Furthermore, video of meetings in the Petition Committee, where petitions are discussed and petitioners are sometimes invited to make their case, are made available online with the option to select interpretation in each of the official languages. It should be noted that the working language in these meetings is typically English. It is also important to note that that the translation efforts of the EP, from which the e-participation platform benefits, would take place in any case, so that the e-participation mechanism is thus able to piggy-back on already allocated translation practices and resources.

There seems to be a pattern whereby e-participation platforms at the European level mimic the underlying institutional working mode with regard to working languages and resources committed to translation. This tendency is corroborated by the single example among our case studies in which a non-EU e-participation mechanism makes use of multiple languages, namely the Swiss e-voting platform. On this platform all information is made available in all official languages, which is traditional for the underlying Canton institutions. In this case, the translation workload is lightened considerably by the fact that the mechanism is a voting mechanism without deliberation.

It is a well-known dilemma of the European Union that full inclusiveness demands considerable investment in translation, while full efficiency privileges English as a working language. Considerable investments in new tools for digital translation have therefore been ongoing since at least the first Framework Programme for Research and Development (1984–87). However, the promises of digital translation have long seemed a mirage; always on the horizon and never quite as good as expected. Despite these setbacks, a new wave of optimism exists around translation software based on artificial intelligence and so-called deep learning (www.​ec.​europa.​eu/​citizens-initiative). One recent paper thus claims that a new version of Google’s translation software was scored by observers to have a degree of fluency in the translation of random sentences from English to Spanish, which was very close to that of human translators (5.43 on average compared to 5.55 for humans). It is outside the scope of this report to assess the plausibility of such claims and the implied hopes for a more multilingual Internet that comes with it. However, there is no doubt that while digital translation into the major languages of the world are seeing massive investment, the European Union and its Member States will be forced to add their own investments on top of those of private actors if all of the official languages of the EU are going to have comparable degrees of support. Less ambitious results may be useful, of course. We would thus expect the availability of digital translation into the few most widely spoken languages in Europe to greatly improve the accessibility of EU-level e-participation mechanisms.

An often-discussed challenge is the multilevel nature of European governance. It is well-known that governance complexity rises proportionally with the many levels of governance that the European system encompasses. With the upper echelons of this system having often only indirect connections with national representative democracies, it is easy to assume that e-participation at the EU level will automatically inherit the democratic deficit/‘no demos’ problems of the governance system as a whole. However, examples such as the UK Democratic Dashboard (see Part II, Chap. 2) show that it is possible to construct a common access point to a multinational and multilevel governance system, even if not all potential users have access to participation in all of the channels of participation. The digital infrastructure of the Five Star Movement similarly shows that a common infrastructure for local-, national- and European-level political participation can provide much-needed advice, guidance and overall structuration for citizens wishing to participate in decision-making (Part II, Chap. 10). Of course, the fact that the construction of such common infrastructures is technically possible means neither that it is necessarily, politically feasible nor that developing a well-functioning system is easy. Our point here is only that the constitutional difficulties of European democracy do not by necessity translate into roadblocks for a common European e-participation platform.

As regards the so-called ‘digital divide’ (Mossberger et al. 2003, 2007), there are good reasons to revisit some of the assumptions underlying the traditional discussion of the divide between advanced and less advanced regions of Europe, given the development infrastructures for Internet access over the last decades. Granted, Europe-wide patterns of exclusion of the elderly, citizens with lower levels of education and citizens with disabilities from digital platforms of e-government and e-democracy remain (as discussed, e.g. by Van Dijk 2012 and Panopoulou et al. 2014). But these patterns are not specific to the EU level: they affect opportunities for e-participation at all levels of government. More importantly, with regard to access to basic broadband they no longer map onto the underlying divides between richer and poorer regions of Europe (Negreiro 2015). While the digital divide as traditionally understood is thus a challenge to be addressed by any e-participation platform, this challenge is not exclusive to participation on decision-making at the EU level. Rather, it is a reminder that all efforts at increasing citizens’ participation in policymaking should beware of an online-only strategy; face-to-face participation processes supported by effective mobilization efforts must remain in the toolbox.

If an EU-specific digital divide is to be considered a relevant challenge for e-participation at the European level, it is the cultural divides between Member States with a great deal of trust between governments and their populations regarding the sharing and recording of personal data such as ideological standpoints, and those Member States which—for good historical reasons—do not have the same degree of trust. This cultural divide concerning degrees of digital openness presents a real challenge to the plausibility of common European approaches to e-government under any form, including e-democracy and e-participation.

Keeping these qualifications in mind, the following sections will present and discuss suitable e-participation approaches at the EU level in greater detail, while taking into account some of the above-mentioned institutional characteristics and weaknesses.

At the time of writing (February 2019), a vote by the European Parliament on a European Commission proposal to improve the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) is imminent. A reform proposal was made by the EC in September 2017, which sought to respond to a number of critiques and suggestions put forward by stakeholders, including some of those discussed below; the multi-NGO ECI Campaign welcomed EC’s proposal as an ‘overdue step’ in the right direction.² The proposal went through interinstitutional negotiations in late 2018 and thus currently awaits a parliamentary decision. Our analysis of the ECI in this section takes the ECI as it existed before EC’s proposal as a reference point.

As the first transnational e-participation tool for policy agenda-setting, which has an institutional embedding as strong as the one provided by the ECI in the Lisbon Treaty’s §4, the platform is both unprecedented, and still unparalleled in terms of the advancement of participatory democracy at transnational level (cf. Part I, Chap. 4). In formal terms, the ECI gives citizens a powerful agenda-setting tool, given the conditions that a proposal must fall within the remit of the European Commission and gather 1 million signatures. Ideally, the mechanism would both allow citizens to take collective actions and allow decision-makers within the EU institutions to gain greater insight into citizens’ concerns. Furthermore, the ECI platform has arguably grabbed the attention of organized civil society and thus created an existing user base, which could help to propel the platform forward in the case of a process of revisiting and expanding its reach.

Despite these positive notes, there has been widely shared criticism of the ECI mechanism as implemented. The consensus position here seems to be that not only could the digital platform itself and the digital support tools be made more user-friendly but more importantly that the underlying legal constraints and the way they are interpreted by the EC block a culture of open involvement and engagement with citizens.³ Since the ECI was implemented, over 70 proposals have been submitted, of which only four have been successful in passing the entrance demands, with a fifth on its way. The submission of proposals has been declining, likely due to the poor success rates of their predecessors. Of the failed proposals, roughly a third failed to gather the necessary support, another third were retracted by the submitters, and the remainder were rejected on formal grounds.

From a constitutional point of view, this should come as no surprise. As mentioned above, the Lisbon Treaty is explicitly based on principles of representative rather than participatory democracy, and it favours organized interests over individual citizens. These principles are mirrored in the conditions under which the ECI functions. The demand that the proposal submitted must fall within EC’s competencies to act places a heavy burden of regulatory insight on those wishing to formulate and submit proposals. And the demand that proposals must gather one million signatures, with its various technical and security requirements, places a burden of organizational capacity and resources on proposers. In terms of the above-mentioned conditions for successful participation, a central weakness of the ECI is thus that although it provides an opportunity to participate, it fails to support this opportunity with a strategy for mobilizing and engaging citizens.

It is, therefore, no surprise that reform is now underway. However, the limited rights to ‘voice’ and ‘consultation’ established in §11 of the Lisbon Treaty could, in a practical context, be interpreted much more widely than is currently the case for the ECI. It would be legal and also practically possible to support citizens to formulate citizens’ initiatives and ensure that proposals meet the terms of EC’s competencies to act. The Finnish Open Ministry platform, for example, makes active use of volunteer experts, who support the formulation of citizens’ initiatives to ensure that they fall within the remits of the body to which they are addressed (see Part II, Chap. 7). In lieu of such support having been provided for the ECI, NGOs have had to coalesce around the ECI Campaign, where they have attempted to provide citizens with some measure of support.⁴ Part of the ongoing reform debate is, therefore, the question of where the responsibility lies for supporting citizens’ participation via the ECI. Receiving little or no support from the EU institutions in their efforts to use the ECI mechanism, it would be no surprise if non-organized citizens suspect that the ECI in its original form was intentionally designed as a half-measure. The ECI has arguably set the stage for an unfortunate outcome where almost all proposals fail to qualify, either by falling outside the scope of EC’s remit or by lack of mobilization and support.

Another important aspect of the ECI debate is what happens to proposals once they pass the qualification criteria. What exactly is the formal process for treating successful proposals, and how are they used in decision-making processes? The presence of such clarity is one of the most important conditions for the positive impact of participatory mechanisms and tools on decision-making and agenda-setting processes.

The EC’s earlier strategy of achieving improvements within the existing framework has also been effective to some extent and should be pursued further as a complementary path to current reform attempts. Our analysis thus points to several opportunities to improve the mechanism through decisive action by institutional leaders.

Among the most obvious opportunities for improvement are greater support for proposal formulation and better follow-up regarding the processing of proposals after submission. Furthermore, following the success of the Five Star Movement (Part II, Chap. 10), to support mobilization efforts by ECI initiators, the ECI digital platform could be broadened to allow organized civil society to use it as a mobilization and campaigning platform, for example, by integrating online community functions as well as functions to support offline meetings.

More broadly, it is important not to fall into the trap of believing that improving the ECI is simply a matter of finding the right technical or legal ‘fix’. The challenge of opening up the ECI platform to active engagement with European citizens is more than a matter of the adoption of new digital tools and new legislation. Getting the ECI to work for citizens is just as much a matter of organizational culture and leadership commitment. If a relaunch of the ECI was to take place, it would be essential that the process should not be one-sided. Instead, the relaunch process itself should seek to embody a new openness and a willingness to engage in mutual learning along the way. It would, therefore, be important to open up the implementation process to user involvement and to work actively with local and national governments as well as NGOs to draw on their experiences (Table 13.1).

In the following, we treat the common consultation platform of the European Commission alongside the European Parliament (EP) Petitions Portal. Although both these tools have a formal link to the decision-making process, there are still some important weaknesses to alleviate.

Albrecht (2012) reviews the e-consultation practice at EU level with a focus on the Your Voice in Europe platform, building on analyses of other scholars (cf. Quittkat and Finke 2008; Quittkat 2011; Tomkova 2009). His main points are as follows: online consultations have become a well-established instrument regularly used by practically all Directorate Generals (DGs). This has increased existing participation opportunities and brought more frequent public participation, especially of diverse interest groups, resulting in broader input into EU policymaking and the extension of its knowledge base. However, serious flaws include opaque and sometimes inadequate processing of contributions; a shift of focus on to closed question formats; little evidence of mutual learning; lack of feedback to participants on the use of their contributions, entailing frustration; one-way formats of communication with no opportunities to debate contributions; limited use of technologies (general purpose instead of specific e-participation and web 2.0 tools); and a lack of integration of new arenas for debate, e.g. the political blogosphere (Albrecht 2012: 15 ff.).

Albrecht advocates a model of deliberative e-consultations, which not only consist of collecting comments on a policy proposal but also allows for discussions both among the participants and with representatives of the EU institutions concerned. This is supported by our comparative case-analysis, where these two conditions—interaction with other participants, and interaction with decision-makers—appear to be very important in order to have an impact on the agenda-setting process. However, the implementation of such a model is confronted with a number of unresolved problems, such as how to adapt a face-to-face format to a large-scale setting, high costs, a minority of participants being willing to engage more deeply, the need to facilitate the process and to inform and support the participants and the reluctance of officials and policymakers to participate. With regard to improvements in technological support, natural language processing and argument visualization technologies are regarded as interesting candidates, although evaluation results to date are mixed. A third approach is to integrate e-consultations with ‘third places’ in new ways, i.e. social media platforms such as the blogosphere and popular social networking sites, in order to counter the dominating top-down flavour of existing EU channels. The assumption is that a good deal of exchange on these sites includes political talk and that the separation between political content and life world is increasingly blurred. Several EU projects have already experimented with linking e-consultations to social media (cf. Albrecht 2012: 19). Taken together, the strategies outlined show some promise to develop e-consultations to a model which is more open and effective than existing practice, and which will also enhance the quality and legitimacy of policy decisions with the help of tools such as Your Voice in Europe.

With regard to the EP Petitions Portal, Tiburcio (2015) examined ‘The Right to Petition’ in the European Parliament for the Committee on Petitions and made recommendations for the EU petition system. Tiburcio notes that recent studies on petitions tend to neglect the petitioning system of the European Parliament, referring to it as being a ‘well-embedded process to deal with petitions’ (Tiburcio 2015: 12). In his study Tiburcio comes to the following conclusion:

[…] the petition system of the European Parliament compares well overall with the petition systems of Parliaments of Member States. In terms of conventional features, it scores well in all dimensions: ensures direct access (and not intermediate) by citizens; it’s highly inclusive and open to both national citizens of Member States as nationals from third countries, if they reside within the EU territory; it offers possibilities for greater involvement of citizens, including through frequent hearings, followed by public debate in committee. (Tiburcio 2015: 40).

Working within these limitations, it would nevertheless seem reasonable to make some use of the inputs gathered through the platform. The Petitions Committee could, for instance, make an inventory of what people ask for in inadmissible petitions, which could be distributed among MEPs and perhaps even national parliaments. Taking this idea one step further, the Petitions Portal could gradually be expanded to serve as a multilevel petition system with connections between the existing local, national and European institutions. This would give an enhanced basis for understanding issues which are stirring among European citizens, compared with top-down tools such as consultations and polls.

Comparing the Petitions Portal to Your Voice in Europe is illustrative in a number of ways. Your Voice in Europe exemplifies a one-stop-shop for EC consultations, which is a great advance on previous decentralized approaches. However, the consultation formats have not yet been harmonized across the different DGs, which makes the process less transparent for users than it could be. Upfront clarity about use of the inputs gathered through the platform could be improved. And there is a lack of feedback to citizens about the outcomes. The EP Petitions Portal, by contrast, has relatively clear feedback mechanisms, although this often comes late. The Petitions Portal has even less upfront transparency about what citizens may expect to happen to their input than the consultation platform. Information management is a concern with regard to both platforms. Petitions produce not only quantitative data but also potentially vast amounts of qualitative statements. Aggregating such input is both time consuming and politically risky; especially because there is no mechanism for the approval or disapproval of aggregation choices made by Commission services and by the people who provided the input. This leaves a great deal of power to shape the outcomes of consultations in the hands of the secretariat functions of the DGs. Similarly, the lack of transparent curation of petitions submitted to the EP Petitions Portal, along with the lack of clarity about the use of the inputs submitted, gives leeway for selective interpretation to the EP Petitions Committee. In terms of user experience, both platforms suffer from typical ailments of online participatory tools: a lack of interactivity; a lack of deliberation; and a lack of mobilization efforts. Together, these weaknesses produce results that may be recognized across a broad array of e-participation cases: over-population by organized interests and elites; and a lack of publicity.

Despite these shortcomings, we believe that relatively simple measures could considerably improve the socio-technical functionality of the platforms.

Your Voice in Europe could:

The EP Petitions Portal could:

Such deliberative functions can be more or less structured. The 5SM makes use of debate platforms that are open to everyone, while voting on proposals is for registered users only. The Petities.nl platform has a structure where users cannot comment directly on proposals, but must make counter-proposals; the ‘debate’ between opposing proposals is then settled by voting. How to balance openness and structure is a question to be settled through experiment and experience. The major criterion is not to reinvent the wheel, but to keep working on the platform to improve its usefulness and popularity while drawing on experience from others along the way. This is underlined in the comparative case analysis by the fact that the condition of sustainability—improving the tool over time—contributes considerably to impact on final decision-making (Table 13.2).

This idea is that given the positive experiences with participatory budgeting methods by European cities, regions and Member States, there must be areas of EU spending where such methods could help to enhance citizens’ participation. Current best practices such as described in, e.g. the Belo Horizonte and Paris case studies (Part II, Chap. 10), show that an e-participatory element is essential for scaling-up such methods. At the same time, however, face-to-face interaction and a certain rootedness in local situations is characteristic of all successful cases of participatory budgeting. Finally, the general conditions for the success of e-participation also apply here. For example, the Belo Horizonte case shows that failure to achieve a clear understanding among the participants concerning the mandate given to the process is lethal. In this case, the participation rate decreased enormously over time, in 2006 172,938 participants online and in 2013 8900. This was due to the failure to implement the winning project in 2008, after which people lost their trust in the procedure, despite other projects having been implemented. The question is therefore as follows: Given the complexity of the European decision-making process, can participatory budgeting even be conceived of at the level of the common European budget? Or should methods of participatory budgeting be seen as a means to making a connection between citizens and the EU at the local and regional level?

There is no doubt that setting aside a certain percentage of the total EU budget to be distributed by citizens would be a powerful symbolic gesture. However, there are many ways in which such a mechanism could go awry from the beginning. Allocating funds at the discretion of citizens would demand the implementation of some methodology to avoid simply reproducing current patterns of influence of different Member States. The participants at the workshop pointed to the Horizon 2020 EU research framework programme as an example of an allocation mechanism which is constructed to avoid simply reproducing national interests and focuses instead on the excellence and societal relevance of projects. The EU-funded CIMULACT project⁵ provides an example where citizens have been involved, albeit indirectly, in the allocation of funds through the Horizon 2020 mechanism. Their role is to produce visions, priorities and calls for projects. A similar role might be conceivable if a budget was allocated to participatory budgeting at the EU level. One participant suggested such a mechanism might be thought of as an Erasmus programme for entrepreneurs, i.e. a platform where young entrepreneurs could submit ideas and compete for funding from participating citizens. Other participants underscored that such an allocation mechanism ought to be flexible and oriented towards pressing problems, such as—in these years—migration, climate change and improved education. Experiences from city-level cases show that participatory budgeting methods that start with small but realistic setups have a better chance of achieving longevity than those that make big promises, but do not follow through. For this reason, one participant suggested that it would be useful to start small and allow for an ongoing process of community-building to take place around the mechanism, which might then grow over time.

The EU already has well-established mechanisms for reallocating EU budgets to local initiatives and concerns through the Structural Funds. The Regional Development Fund as well as the Social Fund both already assign significant decision-making authority about the spending of these funds to the local or regional level. Building on lessons learned in cases ranging from Belo Horizonte to Paris (Part II, Chap. 10), it is not at all hard to imagine a unified framework for participatory budgeting being implemented as part of these budgeting processes. The availability of good projects and the willingness to back them would be crucial. But given the local development ambition of these funding programmes, and taking into account the much smaller scale of application, it would be feasible at this level to implement more open co-creation processes which reached organically from idea formulation to project application, funding decisions and implementation. In the wider perspective of regional development policy, it is conceivable that the input and throughput stages of participatory budgeting could bring together decision-makers, citizens and local organizations and businesses in a process that may help to create a common focus point for the community.

This idea is to expand the palette of online engagement tools available to citizens to interact with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) (and vice versa), beyond those that are currently available via the Petitions Portal and the EP website. Such tools could include:

Most of these tools already exist (see Part II): votewatch.eu is an example of how voting patterns can be recorded and made public; WriteToThem and Abgeordenetenwatch both include an example of how posing questions to MEPs could be implemented; Your Voice In Europe already has the functionality needed to enable MEPs to post online consultations; and some MEPs have already adopted personal online blogging platforms to share work-in-progress and engage with citizens. The technical challenge is thus very minor in providing such tools to MEPs.

For such additional tools to have an effect on the relationship between European citizens and their MEPs, such tools would have to be both technically and strategically integrated with social media. Our case studies of TheyWorkForYou in the UK and Abgeordenetenwatch in Germany show that such functionalities in and of themselves tend to reach mainly organized interests and journalists, while social media provide a bridge through which ordinary citizens may also become involved. This reflects a tendency in which social media have grown to act as central hubs for communication and social networking in contemporary society; hubs that enable decentralized production and co-creation of ideas and even societal movements (Skoric et al. 2016). For most contemporary organizations, this tendency has produced a shift in online presence strategies from an emphasis on drawing traffic to the organization’s website, to a focus on producing content that gains traction on social media platforms. Making this same shift in the EP would imply providing MEPs and their staff with the tools needed to send their ‘fish hooks’ into the whirlpool of social media debates in order to draw citizens onto their own platform for debate and co-creation (Dahlgren 2013).

Our case interviews indicate that initially some parliamentarians will see this as an ‘extra’ workload. The argument could be made, however, that online engagement is not going away, but is rather a new element of the changing role of the parliamentarian: from that of a representative of societal groups to that of a figurehead for an ‘affective public’ (Papacharissi 2015). In any case, it is clear that increased online engagement will make new demands of MEPs and that—as argued earlier—supporting services must go beyond a compliance mindset to one of exploration and co-creation. At the same time, for online engagement with MEPs to work, it is also necessary that parliamentarians and their parties accept a certain loss of control as the price to pay for a more vibrant interaction with (the most active parts of) their constituencies.

This idea is that the contributions and votes of each Member State in relation to decisions made in the Council of the European Union should be made publicly available in an easily accessible form.

Our discussion (Part I, Chap. 3) of the democratic deficit of the EU touched briefly on the Council’s ‘black box’ function in European decision-making. This function is one of many factors that makes the EU seem to many citizens to be an outside force acting on the conditions for national policy. While there is some truth to this perception, increased insight into the actions taken by national governments in the context of the Council would help to dismantle those elements of this perception that rest on illusion or disinformation. It would also help to hold national policymakers accountable for the positions taken in the Council.

Much of the information needed to establish such accountability is already available, through the common EU web-platform, civil society services such as votewatch.eu and the web portals of national governments and parliaments. It is thus possible for the highly intrepid citizen to put many pieces of the puzzle together and to get an outline of the positions taken by nationally elected politicians in the European arena. However, not only does this place an unfair, and for most people prohibitive, burden of information gathering and analysis; key information is simply not available through ordinary channels.

Providing clear insights into the contributions and voting patterns of Member States is less a technical problem and more a question of procedure and culture. Where the line between the two is drawn, i.e. how much additional information could be made available without formal changes to the rules, is outside the scope of this report. Nevertheless, providing such information qualifies as an ‘easy’ step towards overcoming the division between an opaque European policy arena and the national public spheres. It would also, quite naturally, strengthen the ability of European citizens to participate in an informed basis in other, more active forms of e-participation.

This idea is that there is a gap in the policy formulation processes of the European Commission, which could be filled by a mechanism for crowdsourcing policy ideas. ‘Crowdsourcing’ is a highly ambiguous term. In this context we mean a process of gathering ideas through informal and frank exchanges of experiences and views, which is not bound to a specific phase in the decision-making process at the European level. Even assuming that both the European Citizen Initiative and Your Voice In Europe were revamped and relaunched, there would still be a gap between the functions of these two mechanisms, where early-stage policy development could benefit from open and frank sharing of ideas between European Commissioners, their staff and citizens. This early stage of pathfinding is especially vulnerable to lobbying activities by organized interests. While an online debate platform would not be a safeguard against such dominance, it would at least provide ordinary citizens with a space to engage with EU institutions in an informal manner that is otherwise only possible for lobbyists and other organized actors. The web portal Debatingeurope.eu provides an example of how such a crowdsourcing approach to the interaction between European citizens and decision-makers could be structured in an informal manner.

The creation of an informal crowdsourcing platform would help the EC to seize an otherwise missed opportunity to create a space for policy debate with a more transparent and ordered structure than the one currently provided for European citizens by social media. A crowdsourcing mechanism could also help to gather ideas for how the EC should interpret and weigh different expert and stakeholder inputs. For example, tools such as Futurium produce a wealth of expert ideas, but no clear synthesis. Here, a crowdsourcing mechanism could provide a space for follow-up discussions in the wake of foresight exercises, where less expert participants could become involved and help to develop ideas for policy strategy. By giving decision-makers and their staff a forum for gaining immediate feedback on tentative ideas and considerations, a crowdsourcing tool could also help to create more transparency in the policy formulation process, simply by making it possible to understand the thinking that went into more formal documents.

There are obvious risks to a more open platform. The Predlagam platform (Part II, Chap. 8) is an example to learn from. On this platform, which is an initiative of the Slovenian government, participants can add a proposal on current regulation or propose new regulation. There is room for voting and deliberation both between participants and with policymakers and some feedback from the government on the proposals since they are obliged to react. Impact is low, however, partly because many of the proposals would be difficult to achieve (see examples in the case study). Interesting criticism from one of the interviewees was that the format of the tool is too open and that it should be more structured, with more information given on what kind of input the government wants from citizens. This, of course, goes hand in hand with limiting the scope of participation and bureaucratizing the manner in which a proposal must be made. The interviewed researcher was of the opinion that the open structure of the Predlagam.vladi tool would not be an issue if there were sufficient staff to process the ideas: ‘The policy process is very complex. And citizens should be aware how complex it is. I don’t think that they should be fooled’. Taking the lessons learned in Slovenia into account, our proposal is not to develop a stand-alone crowdsourcing platform, which would in itself risk becoming a ‘black box’.

However, a crowdsourcing platform would perhaps be the ideal starting point for a one-stop-shop for online participation in European policy processes. While an online crowdsourcing platform could provide valuable input in and of itself, its main usefulness from a citizens’ perspective would be as a springboard for deeper involvement, e.g. through Citizens Initiatives, EC consultations or EP petitions. From the perspective of the EU institutions, the input gathered from crowdsourcing could serve as inspiration alongside more formal expert group and stakeholder consultations. This could also help to hone the framing of consultations opened on Your Voice in Europe.

There are good reasons to explore this idea. Lironi (2016) argue that crowdsourcing platforms may enhance participation by involving civil society beyond typical stakeholder groups, as well as reaching young people, which may contribute to a learning process where both citizens and decision-makers broaden their understandings of a given topic and the range of opinions that exist on that topic. This argument is at least partially supported by our case studies of the Finnish Open Ministry and Wiki Melbourne, which both reached young people to a greater degree than is typical in participatory exercises (Part II, Chaps. 7 and 8). However, both of these case studies also showed clear tendencies towards over-representation of white, male, highly educated citizens. The main expectation of a less formal crowdsourcing platform should therefore not be that it will create a representative picture of what ‘people’ think. Rather, crowdsourcing is an opportunity to broaden debates by going beyond the implicit bounds that may arise in the Brussels ‘bubble’.

Other cases, such as the Five Star Movement (Part II, Chap. 10) and the Icelandic experience of crowdsourcing a new constitution (Part II, Chap. 8), show that once an online platform grows beyond a compliance mindset, it may gain vibrancy and take a decisive role in the democratic community. The Five Star movement, centering in part on online crowdsourcing of policy ideas and strategies, has thus successfully mobilized a base of support that not only rivals existing political parties but has also placed the movement as the second largest Italian party. The Icelandic case similarly shows that a crowdsourcing platform can come to play a central role in public policy discourse, but also shows that a successful e-participation tool is in itself not enough to ensure policy impact. Care must be taken to balance formal and informal structures and to be clear about the ability of citizens to influence (or not) the process of policy formulation. The recipe for success here seems to be honesty and straightforwardness.

While these cases provide grounds for cautious optimism and concern regarding the plausibility of establishing a crowdsourcing platform to supplement the ECI and Your Voice in Europe, it is necessary to take into account the limitations of online-only platforms with regard to the facilitation of deliberation. Earlier in this book, we reviewed recent literature on policy crowdsourcing and found some critical warnings that are of the highest relevance in this context (Part I, Chap. 4). Face-to-face deliberative processes for the delivery of citizens’ input to policy are often marked by high citizen interest, are often quite cost-effective and—when supported by effective mobilization strategies—may even provide superior performance regarding the inclusion of marginalized people and the overcoming of prejudice (Collingwood and Reedy 2012). However, deliberation is no silver bullet and only provides such benefits in settings that live up to other quality criteria at the same time. One well-established ‘fact’ among observers and stakeholders is that clear outcomes only come from deliberation when it is combined with some form of aggregation. The possibility to vote (quantitative aggregation) was thus present in nine of the twelve cases in which an actual impact on decisions was detected. But many online systems that claim to reproduce the deliberative situation quite simply do not. Many such systems support the construction of group identity and community very well, but fail to facilitate a respectful and consensus-oriented political dialogue (Kersting 2013). For this reason, when the purpose of a participatory process includes mutual exploration and co-creation, many expert observations point to the necessity of mixing online and face-to-face participation in processes; even if no one expects the potential gains from such processes to come easily (e.g. Kersting 2013; Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015). Our comparative case analysis also shows that the possibility to participate both online and offline is an important condition to create an impact on the agenda-setting process.

We expect that this latter recommendation will fall on fertile ground in the European Commission, where a recognition of the necessity of blending online and offline elements seems to pervade those DGs that are currently experimenting with online engagement. The Futurium platform⁶ is one example. This platform is developed by DG Connect to enable co-creative processes involving policymakers in explorative and creative deliberation of possible futures in Europe (Part II, Chap. 9). This platform blends a wide range of online options for debates with offline meetings and events in order to enable structured deliberation and knowledge exchange. The CIMULACT project funded by DG Research and Innovation is another example. This platform is developed by a consortium of organizations to enable citizens and experts to co-create visions of a future Europe and to formulate priorities and calls for research and innovation to support these visions. This project blends online consultations with offline co-creation processes to enable the broadening of participation in the formulation of research and innovation policy.

Together, these two examples show that the idea of using crowdsourcing as a feed-in to policy already has support among EC decision-makers. Given the precedence of creating a one-stop-shop for online consultations across the DGs (i.e. Your Voice in Europe), it seems to be a natural next step to seek to establish a parallel or directly connected one-stop-shop for policy-crowdsourcing.