Getting national civic platforms engaged may boost citizen engagement with European citizens’ initiatives

Working in the civic technology field for more than five years now has given me ample opportunities to think about people's motivation to engage, vote, and express their attitude using different digital and non-digital means. When the discussions around untapped potential of engaging on EU level emerge, often enough people suggest that the motivation behind an active EU citizen most probably originates in his or her own experience with local democratic exercises, be it in their country or city, or even on the street they live on.

This yet unproven theory suggests that if people feel empowered to change or impact things which are close around them, only then they will feel empowered to express their attitudes toward issues and policies related to Europe. For example, voice their opinions towards bee-friendly agriculture or a ban on biometric mass surveillance practices. Both European citizens’ initiatives are in an active  process of signature collecting at the moment, alongside with twelve others.   

All this led me to a question - could failures in local citizen activism have an impact on our engagement on issues that are much further away from us, at the EU level?

Motivation to participate

To tackle a bit further the possible relationship between the different levels of involvement, it would be useful to look at the general motivation and factors contributing to people's activism. Academics suggest several factors that contribute to the people’s willingness to be involved in creating and redistributing public goods, including expressing their political opinion on particular issues. Firstly, the various communities and networks to which the individual belongs naturally (e.g., by birth in a specific family) or voluntarily (e.g. university or religious community) can affect the motivation and expose more possibilities for a person to express the opinion or try to influence decisions, as highlighted by Latvian researcher J. Nikisins in his 2019 study “Individual and collective involvement in solving problems relevant to the community and society”.

Another approach to understand the motivation behind activism suggested by J. Nikisins is that people act and seek to bring about change in their immediate or broader neighbourhood in response to a problem or some emerging need that affects the individual as a social group representative. In essence, people become active where they feel the gap between the desired and the real situation and the dissatisfaction that it brings along. 

However, I have noticed that none of these theories suggest a broad division between activism on different scales and different levels. They only reinforce the universal motivational factors for people to engage. It doesn’t matter if it is to advocate for people’s rights in a particular municipality or in the region they live in. It is not necessarily about the past local experience of a person. It is more about having a general motivation to participate for the sake of changing things for the better. 

If a person in one way or another feels the impulse of engaging in civic activism, he or she can do it as well on EU or global level. Of course, it always depends on the particular form of activism, as some of them can mean sacrificing a person's personal resources, like time or even money. Not having these resources can be an obstacle for further involvement in civic activities. But another quite important one is the lack of information about the current political issues concerning and impacting particular groups or society and the opportunities to engage in discussions about them. 

Bringing EU issues down to local level

When we look at the European Citizens’ Initiative being a particular form of citizens' activism  on EU level, the issues of accessibility and reach have always been of concern to the EU and civic society of Europe. 

And the question of how to improve the efficiency and reach of the European Citizens’ Initiative has never been more pressing than now when Europe desperately looks for more ways to come closer to its citizens.

One way how the information transfer could work more efficiently would be the bottom-up approach that would channel all the information about European citizens’ initiatives primarily through the national civic platforms. From the technical point of view, it would mean to have very well-oiled and reliable national platforms in every EU member state, with the European dimension added to them. Tearing down the mental barriers between the issues of national states, concerning only their citizens, and EU-level issues, seemingly relevant only to decision-makers.

In this model, national level platforms would serve as a bridge between the member states and the EU. The problem to tackle here is quite possibly not the lack of motivation. It is the existing information deficit about the ongoing EU-level citizen initiatives and why they are relevant to people's everyday lives. Bringing the EU level down to the local level and integrating EU issues in the digital environment they already know and understand can lift the participation rate extensively. It can help to engage citizens on EU-level issues while going on about their daily civic activities in their hometowns.

Some communities behind the initiatives already do a good job on using their networks to set in motion the information flow in several Member States. For example, the initiative towards bee-friendly agriculture has created a network with support organisations, both thematic and infrastructure-wise. It equips these organisations with interactive widgets to sign the initiative. These widgets can be placed in national or local level sites and can serve as an infrastructure to significantly raise the level of collected signatures.