Pathways and Obstacles to eParticipation at the European level

Abstract

Since the early 2000's, the European Institutions have set up several eParticipation projects. These projects are embedded in different political strategies and are managed by different actors within the institutions. This leads to a wide variety of projects and prevents the European Union to develop a single and concerted strategy in terms of online participation.
This paper intends to compare two different models of online consultation : the Commission consultations hosted on the site Your Voice in Europe, and the European Citizens' Consultation 2009. The paper tackles three main subjects : the institutional strategies which frame these sites; the actors that they mobilize; their main and collateral effects. The goal of this synthesis is to identify some key features that fit to the european context, in order to assess the possibilities of sustainability of such political experiments.