Article de Jessy Bailly : « The Equivocality of the EU Citizen Turn: Multiple Conceptions of Citizen Deliberation »
Jessy Bailly, « The Equivocality of the EU Citizen Turn: Multiple Conceptions of Citizen Deliberation », Politics & Policy, Vol. 53(3), 2025. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/polp.70052/
Abstract:
European institutions have promoted and implemented a citizen turn since the beginning of the 2000s, with the use of mini-publics where randomly selected citizens deliberate on European policies. Even if citizen deliberation can nowadays be considered as a consensual narrative of European Union (EU) legitimization, the article contends that it remains an interesting proxy through which to understand and evaluate power struggles among several EU actors. Notably, not all the actors involved in designing and implementing citizen procedures at the EU level do so for the same interests and with shared conceptions. Based on documentary analysis, interviews, and the observation of three EU citizen randomly selected procedures, this article identifies several conceptions of citizen deliberation: the civic conception, the identity-building conception, the neo-managerial conception, and the political instrumentalization conception. Such equivocality of citizen deliberation at the EU level enriches academic analyses focusing on the institutional lockdown of citizen deliberative experiments.
