Discursive strategies for citizen participation in the EU: a normative assessment of the conference on the future of europe

This article outlines an analytical framework to discuss the achievements of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE). We focus on the normative goals incorporated to the organizational strategy of the European institutions, which we use as standard for the assessment of the Conference outcomes. Firstly, we identify the discursive strategies that have been incorporated into the EU's institutional development: 'neopluralist', 'strong public sphere' and 'participatory'. Secondly, we analyse how these strategies combine in the official documents to specify the normative goals of the Conference, as well as the mechanisms and procedures implemented to achieve them. We consider that these strategies assume a 'deliberative system approach' that give us criteria for the assessment of the Conference. Thirdly, we use these normative criteria to evaluate how the institutions have justified the final outcomes and the corresponding proposals. We conclude that the Conference has been dominated by a neopluralistic 'deliberative governance' approach that has led commentators and EU institutions to assess it adopting a narrow understanding of participation as if limited to citizens' panels. On the contrary, our analytical framework stresses the relevance of improving democracies through different interconnected mechanisms involving and representing citizens in a complex way.