Bringing the citizen back into EU democracy: against the input-output model and why deliberative democracy might be the answer

Firat Cengiz 

Weaknesses in the EU’s responses to recent challenges, such as the 2008 economic and financial crisis and the refugee crisis, exacerbated the EU’s notorious democratic deficit. Most notably, there has been a significant increase in the citizens’ distrust to the EU institutions and the political system in the aftermath of the 2008 economic and financial crisis. Provocatively it could be argued that the EU’s democratic deficit has now turned into a legitimation crisis that is defined by Beetham as a crisis that erodes citizens’ beliefs that are necessary to the system to have a stable continued existence (p.186). The erosion of citizens’ beliefs is most strongly reflected in the 2016 UK referendum in which the majority of the voters opted for ending their countries’ EU membership. Accordingly, the EU’s stable and guaranteed future existence depends on the strengthening of its relationship with citizens.

The debate on the democratic deficit proliferates during times of crisis in the EU’s relationship with citizens, as exemplified in the contexts of the rejections of the Maastricht Treaty and the Constitutional Treaty in popular referendums. The EU’s response to the financial and economic crisis and the diminishing role of national and EU level democratic institutions in post crisis economic policymaking caused yet another wave in the debate on democratic deficit. In this debate the national liberal representative democracy model is primarily taken as the ideal model to be aspired at in democratising the EU. As a result, reform suggestions arising from this debate generally do not go beyond incremental improvements that would improve the EU representative democracy without requiring a substantial revision of the founding Treaties. Similarly, reform proposals generally do not involve a substantial rethinking and improvement of the role citizens play in the EU political system.

Misgivings of the democratic deficit debate and the input-output legitimacy model

Surely, stronger representative institutions would contribute positively to the democratic quality of policymaking in the EU. Nevertheless, the ongoing deterioration of the EU-citizen relationship requires a more significant and radical rethinking of the role citizens play in the EU political system. Additionally, national representative democracies suffer from their own idiosyncratic problems particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 economic and financial crisis that include increasing citizen disaffection towards the political system, decreasing election turnouts and resurgence of marginal political parties and movements particularly on the far right. As a result, it is doubtful whether the national representative democracy should be taken as the blueprint of the ideal democratic system in the EU democracy debate.

Secondly, models developed to understand the EU political system and democracy exclusively, most notably the input-output legitimacy model, consider the process of citizen participation to policymaking (input) and the policies’ affects on citizens (output) as individual and separate phenomena. Accordingly, in the light of this model, policies adopted as a result of a technocratic process that does not involve citizen participation could still be considered legitimate if they improve economic efficiency and citizen welfare. The input-output dichotomy overlooks the fact that input and output constitute essentially interdependent and mutually reinforcing aspects of a political system’s relationship with citizens. Output legitimacy refers to policy outcomes’ benefits to citizens and the society. In this sense, output comes close to the concept of common good envisaged in the republican democracy model. It would be extremely difficult to decide what common good is, in other words, what would be the optimal policy option maximising public interest, purely on the basis of expert technocratic policymaking without involving the citizens in this discussion. In the light of the public capture theory, in the absence of a participatory process, non-elected officials and experts are known not to entertain sufficient incentives to commit to broader collective goods such as social justice and welfare in their decisions particularly when these public goods clash with the economic model they favour.

How can deliberative democracy improve the EU-citizen relationship?

Deliberative democracy has become an increasingly popular model in the search for alternative and innovative solutions to strengthen citizens’ relationship with representative democracies. Deliberative democracy aspires at creating a political system organized around communicative principles in which policy decisions are taken as a result of an open communication and discussion process between citizens as to what would be the optimal policy choice maximizing societal interest in response to a policy issue (see Young, p.121). Unlike representative and direct democracy models, deliberative democracy does not perceive citizen preferences as given and exogenous to the political process. In the deliberative model, citizens are given the opportunity to change their preferences and form new opinions as a result of deliberation with fellow citizens who have different or opposing preferences and opinions (ibid). Recent examples of deliberative institutions include British Columbia’s Citizen Assembly, the Australian Citizens Parliament, the Belgian G1000 and the UK’s citizen assemblies. There has also been a plethora of purely scientific deliberative experiments including the Europolis project that brought citizens from different Member States together to discuss European issues with contentious national discourses, such as immigration and environmental protection.

Given its ambition for improving the role citizens play in policymaking, deliberative democracy model is likely to make a valuable and positive contribution to EU democracy. The model aspires at giving citizens a direct voice in policymaking thereby establishing a direct relationship between citizens and the political system. Thus, deliberative democracy could potentially provide an effective solution to the increasingly problematic EU-citizen relationship. Additionally, deliberative experiences in societies divided with deep conflicts, such as South Africa and Northern Ireland, are known to contribute to the diminishing of polarisations between different societal clusters. Similarly, deliberative policymaking could be expected in the long term to bridge the gaps between national political discourses in the EU and contribute to the emergence of a common political sphere. The present weakness of a common political sphere is considered yet another weakness of EU democracy.

Despite its potential for improving EU democracy, deliberative democracy has not yet played a substantial role in the EU democracy debate. Few studies that discuss deliberative democracy in the EU understand it as elite deliberation or interest group representation rather than deliberation by citizens (See e.g. Agustin, 2012). Deliberative democracy studies, on the other hand, whilst advocating deliberative democracy as the ideal model to be followed in the EU and elsewhere, do not offer concrete proposals for the integration of deliberative democracy to the EU political system. There is much to be gained from a dialogue between the EU governance and deliberative democracy scholarships on how deliberative democracy principles could be integrated into EU’s institutional framework with a view to strengthen the role citizens play in EU policymaking.

Questions to be answered for the design of EU deliberative democracy

Benhabib argues that simply by establishing a deliberative institution the aspirations of deliberative democracy cannot be accomplished but for this to happen the entire political system must consist of ‘an interlocking and overlapping networks and associations of deliberation, argumentation’ (pp.73-74). In the light of this view, for the EU or for any other polity to accomplish the deliberative ideal, deliberation should be embedded as the key principle and applied consistently from top to bottom by all political institutions and also by the civil society and the political sphere.

Accordingly, integrating deliberative democracy into the EU political system would involve serious design questions and choices, including founding of a potential permanent citizens’ chamber that would incorporate citizens’ voice to the existing Treaty amendment and legislative procedures as well as ad hoc deliberative platforms to consult with citizens in the context of more informal policy actions, such as EU strategic plans and programmes. Needless to say, given the EU’s size, population and diversity, incorporating deliberative democracy into the EU political system would be politically and economically costly. Nevertheless, the cost could be diminished with the use of alternative methods and modern technology. There is a growing number of experimentations on the use of technology in deliberation with a view to decrease costs and to improve efficiency. Also, in the past the EU has not refrained from investing considerable sums to other projects (such as the Convention on the Future of Europe) that in the end failed to bring the aimed breakthrough in the EU’s relationship with citizens.  Finally, it could be argued that one should refrain from attaching a price tag on democracy particularly in the shadow of the growing deterioration of the EU-citizen relationship (See Smith, 2013).