Simulating democratic reform in the EU: self-legitimation through participatory innovation

The European Commission has increasingly invested in forms of direct citizen engagement, recently establishing European Citizens' Panels as part of its ‘new push for European Democracy’. While such processes have usually been explained as efforts at institutional legitimation, participatory innovations in the EU prove theoretically puzzling: Their strategic and functional value for the Commission remains elusive. This paper develops an alternative theoretical proposition: Rather than legitimating the Commission to an external audience, participatory innovation functions as a simulation of democratic reform that addresses a need for self-legitimation. The analysis demonstrates that participatory innovation can provide the means of self-legitimation precisely because it does not realise democratic participation but enacts a performance of democratic reform. This performance should be understood as a simulation of reform that is both produced by the Commission with a field of advocates, experts, and participation professionals, and designed primarily for this same field of actors. In this way, the instrumental value of participatory innovation lies in how it justifies the work and authority of the Commission to itself. The theoretical proposition is grounded in an empirical study that draws on document analysis of institutional discourse, data on affiliations between actors in the field, and elite interviews.