Brussels, April 1 2009: Thousands of EU citizens are going to be polled on their views on two of the hottest current topics the EU faces – immigration, and climate change. And hundreds of them will be invited to Brussels at the end of May, to take part in an intensive two-day brainstorming with top-level experts. Afterwards, they will be polled again – and their views will be compared with the views of a control group of similar size and character who have not had the opportunity for in-depth discussion of the topics.

Everyone laments the democratic deficit at the heart of the European Union. Now someone is doing something about it. Over the next four months, a scientifically-based research project is going to test what EU citizens would think about key questions if they had a chance to really become informed about them in discussions with citizens from all 27 countries and in more than 20 languages.
A scientific sample will put all of Europe in one room, under conditions where it can really think about the issues. The sample willgrapple with choices normally considered just in sound bites and where people can understand each other across differences of language and nationality. Theorists speculate about the “European public sphere.” In this project we will see it come to life for a weekend.The outcome will provide valuable indications of what would happen if EU citizens became more informed about EU institutional arrangements, decision-making processes, and policy issues, and more aware of the policy preferences of other European citizens on two urgent topics—immigration and climate change. It will offer new answers to vital questions such as: would people make policy choices more in line with their own basic values and beliefs?

• Would policy preferences change, and electoral choices be more aligned with policy preferences?
• Would criteria for policy preferences and electoral choices give greater weight to EU rather than domestic considerations?
• Would dialogue with citizens of other EU nationalities help identify interests and problems shared with other EU citizens? would stronger bonds develop with fellow EU citizens, and induce a sense of belonging to the EU?

In short, if there were more of a Europe-wide public sphere, would there be an increase in civic engagement?

Many discussions of the meaning of democracy at the European level remain remote from real-life experience. The approach taken in this project, known as EuroPolis and run by an international team funded by the EU’s FP7 and by European donors, provides a real opportunity to assess whether and how democratic participation is possible at the European level, and what effects such participation might have on democratic politics in Europe.

In addition, the project takes place in the run-up to the forthcoming European Parliament elections, and surveys of voter behaviour among the survey populations will throw further light on the impact and influence of active involvement in informed discussions of EU policy.

During the project, a series of media opportunities will arise – with researchers, with citizens, with EU policymakers, and above all during the dialogue in Brussels, on May 29-30. A steady stream of material will be released to the media through the usual channels, but interested media can sign up now for early advice on opportunities, at europolismedia@gmail.com

Note for editors: The EuroPolis project employs the Deliberative Polling® method, an approach invented by Prof James Fishkin at Stanford University that tries to put into practice the principle that democratic legitimacy rests on informed opinion, open deliberation, and equal participation of citizens.

The EuroPolis research team includes a wide range of international experts, not only from across the EU, but also from the US, where the deliberative polling method was pioneered. It has first-hand experience in conducting deliberative polls at the local, national and European level, in the UK, Denmark, Bulgaria, and Italy, as well as in the US, Asia and Australia. The team includes some of the main contributors to the first wave of deliberative experiments conducted in 2006-2007 under the Plan D initiative. The participating organisations are University of Siena – Circap, Italy; the University of Essex, United Kingdom; the University of Mannheim, Germany; Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, France; University of Oslo, Arena, Norway; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain; European Policy Centre, Belgium; Avventura Urbana, Italy; TNS Option, Belgium; Median Research Centre, Romania.