European Union

Ukraine launched one of the largest ever drone attacks on Moscow on Wednesday (21 August), the city's mayor said, with Russian air defence units destroying at least 10 drones flying towards the capital.

Portuguese incomes are growing, even with inflation, but wage increases are slowing, with the average wage still close to the minimum wage.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought during a whirlwind trip to the Middle East to inject urgency into efforts to broker a Gaza ceasefire deal, but departed the region on Tuesday (20 August) with an agreement between Israel and Hamas still elusive.

A new rift has emerged within Italy’s governing coalition over the controversial and hotly debated issue of citizenship reform, with Lega (ID) and Fratelli d’Italia (ECR) warning their ally Forza Italia (EPP) not to join forces with the opposition on the matter.

Lithuania is set to expand its military training infrastructure, with the Defence Ministry considering the districts of Tauragė and Šilalė as potential sites for new training centres amid growing demand for military training.

It is time to turn the page on President Emmanuel Macron and LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Raphael Glucksmann, the French Socialist leader in the European Parliament, said in an interview with Le Point.

Polish-German relations appear to have hit a low point after Warsaw refused to help Berlin arrest a Ukrainian citizen living in Poland suspected of causing the Nord Stream 2 explosion, with Prime Minister Donald Tusk unexpectedly telling Germany to remain quiet.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov on Tuesday (20 August) inspected Chechen troops and volunteers readying to fight Ukraine, the Kremlin said, in what was Putin's first trip in 13 years to the North Caucasus republic.

Ukrainian MPs passed a law banning the activities of a Russia-linked branch of the Orthodox church, paving the way for a historic rupture with an institution that Kyiv has accused of complicity in Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

As member states call on the EU Commission to enforce the Union's external borders, the EU's border agency, Frontex, has launched tenders for around €400 million worth of equipment, including the purchase of drones and other surveillance technology.

Railways are the most environmentally sustainable mode of transport, compared to cars or planes, yet, they remain chronically underfunded and underdeveloped in Europe. High prices, complex booking systems, and a lack of cross-border coordination are just some of the problems making it harder for Europeans to consider trains a reliable and safe option.

The new rising star of the Spanish far right, Alvise Pérez, is using the stabbing of an 11-year-old boy in central Spain last Sunday to spread racist and xenophobic messages against immigrants, especially those of African origin.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) approved changes to Meta’s commitments regarding how it uses the data from customers using advertising, the authority announced on Tuesday (20 August).

Sweden’s national epidemiologist does not rule out the possibility of more cases of the new strain of mpox reaching Sweden. Contact tracing has been activated and containment plans have been prepared.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen attended the official groundbreaking ceremony for Taiwanese firm TSMC's Dresden plant on Tuesday (20 August) after the institution she heads announced a €5 billion state aid scheme for the facility - a sign that the EU is redoubling its efforts to boost the bloc's domestic semiconductor production.

The European Union has officially tasked Czechia to use revenues from frozen Russian assets to fund the next ammunition supply for Ukraine, Czech Defence Minister Jana Černochová said on Tuesday (20 August).

The European Commission announced on Tuesday (20 August) that import volumes of Ukrainian honey had exceeded the limit fixed in the regulation setting trade benefits for Kyiv, triggering the reintroduction of tariff quotas.

Over the past decade, the European Union has increasingly experimented with novel forms of public engagement, most recently as part of a New Push for European Democracy. A paradigm of deliberative and participatory innovation that envisages unmediated forms of citizen involvement is advocated by a network of political actors, civil society organisations, and academics. The European Commission in particular has sponsored processes that engage (small sets of) citizens in dialogues and mini-publics; institutional competition over a discourse of “citizen centred” democracy has the European Parliament propose a European Agora with citizens “deliberating on the EU’s priorities” on a regular basis. 

An important narrative justifying the salience of such institutional innovations is that Europeans want greater citizen involvement – which pertains to broader claims about shifting expectations towards democratic politics as citizens would seek more individualised and direct forms of participation. Initiatives such as the Conference on the Future of Europe are said to bolster the democratic legitimacy of the EU because participatory and deliberative innovations could answer such a demand. Crucially, this narrative is anchored in statistical evidence: the public resonance of participatory innovations are connected to (very) large majorities of survey respondents supporting notions such that “citizens should have a bigger say in EU decision making” (Bertelsmann; cf. Eurobarometer) – an empirical proposition that also features in domestic contexts such as the first citizens’ assembly of the German Parliament. 

However, political psychology and public opinion scholarship caution us against straightforward interpretations of this kind of survey data – least to infer strong expectations about the legitimation and trust-building value of participatory and deliberative innovations. Both regarding general statements about citizens’ “say” or “voice” as well as responses to specific forms of involvement such as mini-publics (e.g. PEW), it remains unclear what (different groups of) citizens mean when they react to these questions. The issue is exacerbated in the context of public perceptions of the EU which are mediated by ambivalence, misinformation, and the strong role of national frames for opinion formation. 

How do citizens form opinions on participatory innovations? 

Against this background, my research scrutinises the narrative about the public resonance of citizens involvement in the EU and poses the question: how do different groups of EU citizens form opinions about participatory innovations (PIs) such as mini-publics? While there is a growing body of scholarship that seeks to measure the effects or the external legitimacy of PIs, the state of the literature remains ambivalent: not only is there conflicting evidence but consistent findings e.g. about the influence of demographic or political factors are open to various theoretical interpretations. 

To get a better understanding of the way that citizens form opinions about PIs, I develop a qualitative empirical design that utilises (focus) group interviews to gauge the discourse of participants in three Western EU member states. 32 groups of three to four participants (n=120) were sampled in Germany, Ireland, and Italy on the basis of education, residence (urban/rural), and political vote choice (GAL-TAN). To further address methodological limitations of existing studies, video vignettes were developed which introduce a participatory and deliberative decision-making scenario in a realistic way. 

Fieldwork in Italy: group interviews 

The costly fieldwork was kindly supported by a UACES scholarship, which allowed us to host eight group interviews in the North and in the South of Italy. With my co-author, Elena Pro, we recruited participants in Tuscany and Campania and conducted the interviews in Florence and Naples – with further support at the EUI and Parthenope University. 

With a view to the practical requirements of the research design, I could not have realised the project without the additional support from UACES. It was crucial to travel to the field in-person: Outsourcing recruitment and/or moderation would not only have been beyond the budget of my doctoral research but also methodologically risky in that I would have lost significant control over the process. The scholarship subsidised expenses for two one-week field trips in April and July. 

Funding for doctoral research 

I am grateful for the support by UACES, which allowed me to study how Italian citizens form opinions about participatory and deliberative innovations in the EU. Dedicated research and fieldwork grants for doctoral students are scarce, while the possibilities to collect original empirical data as part of a PhD seem greater than in the past. Digital applications and connectivity lower the bar to implementing comprehensive research designs and the UACES grant allows early-career scholars like me to realise them as part of their PhD.

The post Forming opinions about participatory innovations in the EU – fieldwork in Italy, supported by UACES appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The European Commission lowered its proposed tariffs on China-made electric vehicles (EVs) on Tuesday (20 August) and offered one of the clearest signals yet that it was open to resolving the long-running trade dispute through negotiations, in a move that could ease flaring trade tensions between Brussels and Beijing.

Just ten EU countries have submitted their long-term climate action plans to Brussels, with Austria being the most recent, as large countries like Germany and Spain continue to disregard the June 2024 deadline.