Europeans have a Say: Online Debates and Consultations in the EU

This research project aimed at investigating the quality of political discourses and contributions in consultations online, and seeked to identify how citizens’ input concerning political issues on a European level are reflected in current EU policy.

This research project investigated the quality of political discourses online, and seeked to identify how citizens’ input concerning political issues on a European level are reflected in current EU policy. It was funded within the NODE (New orientations for democracy in Europe) programme initiated by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Culture.
Basically, there is a big hope that new media enhance civic participation and counteract worrisome developments in political life such as declining voter turnouts. European governments and EU institutions have started to use new information and communication technologies to revive the political public sphere, which is supposed to be mainly characterised by deliberative discussions on issues of a common concern. In order to re-connect citizens to the political stage, the EU has set up an initiative called “Your voice in Europe” (http://europa.eu.int/yourvoice) which provides a space for online debates and consultations linked to profound questions on the future of Europe. Against the background of this EU initiative the project pursued four major goals:

• To gauge and analyse the civic and discursive potential of the EU’s interactive participation platforms for supporting an active citizenry.
• To identify whether the EU’s online talkboards are appropriate spaces for dispassionate, reasoned and logical discussions where citizens learn from each other and reflect on issues before taking a decision.
• To illustrate where and how citizens’ input in online consultations finds expression in the EU’s current policy.
• To detect future-oriented requirements which do not only support social-inclusive, effective and output-oriented online deliberation processes but also prove to be robust across various plausible scenarios.

The analyses involved reflections on deliberation providing the theoretical background for a content analysis on online debates and for qualitative expert interviews on online consultations. Against the background of these results, the study also attempted to analyse in a scenario workshop with Austrian experts how online participation in political issues might be designed in Austria in the year 2025.
The project was conducted by the Institute of Technology Assessment at the Austrian Academy of Sciences together with the Centre for Social Innovation in Vienna.
The investigations lead to the following conclusions:

• The EU Online platform ’Your Voice in Europe’ does enable deliberative communication processes, in the sense of common and rational reasoning. Nevertheless the amount of breadth of the democratic potential of this platform is questioned, as both online debates and online consultations were dominated by experts so that the openness and access for others (potentially interested citizens) was limited.
• Online consultations do not provide a space for inclusive public deliberation in a strong sense, since access depends on being already involved in the consultation topic, to belong to interest networks or to be invited to take part. Experts criticise that there is not enough promotion on (ongoing or intended) online consultations. The consultations are also more relevant for public bodies, NGOs and other institutional players than for the single citizen.
• Online consultations can generate and connect networks of interest or practice, if those taking part are regularly invited for further expert focus groups or panel discussions etc.
• Online interaction between representatives and represented leads to greater trust between them. This depends if the responsible unit puts more light on the results of a consultation: Who took part? What were the selection criteria? Which recommendations were provided by the contributors? Which methodological approach was used for the interpretation of the results and what is the policy-outcome?

• Aichholzer, Georg

• Austrian Academy of Sciences

• Content mangement
• Knowledge management and knowledge engineering

• Consultation
• Deliberation
• Information Provision