Citizens’ preferences and the future of Europe: a case for the ‘five scenarios’ as deliberative entry-points in mini-publics

Costello, Anthony (2024) Citizens’ preferences and the future of Europe: a case for the ‘five scenarios’ as deliberative entry-points in mini-publics. Journal of Contemporary European Studies. pp. 1-14. ISSN 1478-2804

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Abstract

Mini publics have become cornerstones of the European Union’s Future of Europe (FoE) initiative. However, weaknesses in their designs bring their political influence into question. Often-unsystematic in design, they fail to strengthen participants' understandings of the issues under evaluation and induce silo-thinking and the formation of pseudo-preferences. These come at a cost to informed and deliberatively deduced recommendations which speak to underlying functional/operational technicalities which fundamentally determine the form and delivery of policy interests. Guided by the adage that form follows function, this paper argues that mini publics pertaining to the FoE must primarily encourage participants to think about the ways policies are made in the EU before they formulate policy recommendations. To do this, they must consider the EU’s overall form (or prospective forms). Utilising data from focus group analysis, the paper demonstrates that scenario (vignette) models are conducive to strengthening participants’ understandings of both existing and alternative EU forms, and their functional consequences for EU policies, thus enabling them to formulate concrete and potentially deliverable policy recommendations. Subsequently, the paper encourages organisers of relevant mini-publics to employ the European Commission’s ‘Five Scenarios for the FoE’ as entry-points to strengthen the deliberative quality and democratic outputs of such exercises.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	© 2024 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Keywords:	Future of Europe Deliberation Participation Preferences Policy Five Scenarios
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities
Depositing User:	Tony Costello
Date Deposited:	10 May 2024 12:45
Last Modified:	16 Dec 2024 11:54
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4221

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