ABSTRACT
Faced with ongoing criticisms of democratic deficit, the EU has engaged in a series of democratic experiments in the first decade of the twenty-first century with the explicit aim of increasing citizen participation in European affairs. The chapters in this book bear testimony to some of the creativity that this unleashed in designing engagement strategies. This chapter offers a comparative assessment of these democratic innovations, judging the extent to which the different designs have provided effective institutional contexts in which citizens have the opportunity to increase and deepen their participation in the European political process. In particular the chapter reflects on two of the driving motivations behind this collection: whether citizen engagement can be institutionalized across the European polity and, more specifically, the extent to which emerging designs are deliberative in character. In short, what can the different experiments tell us about the possibility of the EU institutionalizing deliberative designs?
