The European Citizens’ Initiative Stage: A Snapshot of the Cast and Their Acts

Abstract

The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) is one of the newest additions to the EU civil society field and one of the remains of the aspired democratic reforms of the failed Constitutional Treaty. It moves beyond previous institutional arrangements with civil society by inviting citizens to participate directly in EU politics. The ECI has previously been studied through top-down approaches focusing on its constitutional characteristics and democratic promise, but much remains to be learned about the new actors in the EU civil society field (e.g. Auer, 2006; Szeligowska and Mincheva, 2012). This chapter gives an original account of the horizontal relations within the ECI structure. We do this through a field analysis assisted by Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology. This approach allows us to capture a snapshot of the ECI stage: a moment of interaction in a dynamic setting. The aim is twofold: to explore the actors of the ECI and to evaluate the usefulness and potential of a dramaturgical field analysis.