Project progress
To meet these challenges, the DEFIDEM project is organising working groups, conferences and meetings between partners around two structuring and cross-cutting themes: the relevance of greater citizen involvement in the operation of institutions (1) and the legal framework required for the appropriate development of citizen involvement methods (2).
Three working groups will examine the three dimensions of the subject while interacting with each other.
The first will focus on the challenges of greater citizen involvement in the operation of institutions (coordinated by Laurence Morel and Natasa Danelciuc-Colodrovschi). It will look at the reasons that might justify greater citizen involvement, in particular the integration of citizens into public institutions, but also the criticisms and risks of this omnipresence of citizens in systems that cannot do without representation. These issues will be examined in the light of innovative experiments. This issue will be addressed by a working group made up of political scientists, sociologists and legal experts. The combination of these tools with representative democracy will be studied in order to find the right balance between the institutions and procedures that should be preserved as they are and those that could be modified to encourage citizen involvement.
The second working group will focus on the field of citizen participation (coordinated by Damien Connil and Mathias Revon) and will examine the history, culture and traditions of citizen participation at local and national level. It will also look at the education of citizens in participation and the adaptation of a representative system to new institutions offering opportunities for citizens to influence their representatives directly or indirectly. The degree of openness to the very idea of greater citizen involvement in the operation of institutions differs from one country to another, and fully justifies a reflection on the impact of the history, traditions and culture of each State on the development of institutions. Proposals, adapted to each legal system, will be put forward to make participation more inclusive and boost civic engagement.
The third group will focus on the forms of citizen participation, whether at institutional level or as part of the standards-making process (coordinated by M. Fatin-Rouge Stefanini and P. Taillon). It will be based on the work and experiments carried out by each of the teams in a comparative perspective that goes beyond the national level (studies on the European Union and on the territorial and federated authorities of the States) and goes beyond the framework of the ten partner countries of the project. Lessons will be learned from these experiments and should lead to recommendations.
The three working groups will meet twice a year to discuss the various themes at the heart of the project. Hybrid conferences (face-to-face and webinar) will be organised in parallel throughout the research program.
As well as adding to our knowledge of democratic tools in comparative law, this project will enable us to build up a network of experts, particularly legal experts, who may be of interest to national or local public authorities in the context of future institutional reforms, which are currently the subject of much debate.
