European Citizens' Initiative The main core of the thesis is the problematics of the European Citizens' Initiative, a tool relatively new that was put in place by the Lisbon Treaty and allows one million citizens from at least seven EU Member States to ask the European Commission to propose legislation in areas that fall within its competence. This thesis provides a detailed description of this instrument of participatory democracy, its historical foundations, its development and also the recent proposal for a regulation on the European citizens' initiative that aims to fill the gaps discovered during the period of its existence. It describes the formal and procedural requirements required for the successful submission of the initiative to the European Commission, particularly for registration, and thus the official launch of the initiative. It focuses on the forms of statements of support and the complication that it brought. The thesis also introduces some of the initiatives that have been organised since 2012, both successful and unsuccessful, including those that the Commission has refused to register. There is also an evaluation of the initiatives, the experiences and challenges that the organizers have met and especially the impact of the successful ones. The thesis points out particular...

The topic of this dissertation is the democratic deficit of the European Union and the normative and empirical assessment of the likelihood that the existing forms of institutionalized transnational civic engagement would act as the point of anchoring democratic practices at the EU level. If the democratic deficit reflects the apparent lack of legitimacy and accountability of EU institutions and a lack of influence of its citizens, the question the project attempts to answer is why the existing democratic innovations within the EU constitutional framework fail to attract political allegiance and mobilization necessary for a functioning EU democracy? The thesis attempts to bridge the gap between normative political theory and more empirical and policy oriented approaches to the issue of EU democratic deficit. In a theoretical sense, this research covers a broad spectrum of topics within political theory and the theory of political culture. Parting ways with most of the current literature on the subject, which usually ends with institutional prescriptions derived from descriptions that rely on the nation-state as the benchmark for the prospects of democratisation of the EU, the project seeks to analyse the democratic innovations that the Lisbon treaty introduced within a more comprehensive framework of transnational deliberative democracy - demoicracy. The underlying idea behind the project is to apply, for the first time and with necessary modifications, the basic notions of the founders of the discipline of Political Culture, Almond and Verba, to the EU. That means to draw on their seminal work, ‘The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations’, and hypothesize that further democratization of EU decision-making requires a 'civic political culture'. By definition, it presupposes the dominance of 'participative' over 'subject' and 'parochial' dimensions of orientation towards the political system. After extensive theoretical and methodological considerations, following a brief investigation into political culture in the EU, the empirical focus shifts to the European Citizens’ Initiative and the framings around the struggle for its reform in order to draw findings on which types of political cultures the European Commission has fostered. The principle aim of the research is to investigate if and how the democratic legitimacy of the EU can be enhanced by a shift from a parochial and subject to a more participation-enhancing dynamics. / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis is embedded in the theoretical approach of multilevel governance and presumption of the rational behaviour of actors. Using the method of process tracing it aims to uncover the legislative process in the European Union. It is a single case study and as a case was chosen the negotiation of the regulation of the citizens' initiative. Various actors were involved in the negotiations, this thesis focuses on the main one - European Commission, European Parliament, the Council, interest organisations and national parliaments. The thesis presumed, that all actors will try to push through their interests based on their rational choice. This presumption was verified, although the success rate of the players varied a lot. As the most successful should be considered the European Parliament, who defended the interests of the individuals and the Council, which apparently represented the interests of the governments of the member states (especially in the issues of lowering the bureaucratic burden). The interest organisations showed their positions clearly, however the Commission did not take their positions much into account while preparing the draft regulation. The position of the national parliaments was different then presumed. Although the thesis expected them to be directly involved in the...