Anticipated impact of the EuroPetition service on the WU legislative process

Petitioning has enormous potential as tool for democratic engagement.  It is simple and understood by the public and it requires little effort for the Citizen to carry out a meaningful democratic act.  Recent experience in the UK with the 10 Downing Street Petitioning system has created enormous public interest with over 29,000 petitions being submitted with over 5.8 million signatures, originating from over 3.9 million different email addresses.  With effective marketing the Project Team believe that this can be translated into cross-border actions that directly engage with the European Commission and Parliament.

In spite of the potential of the Information Society and the huge investment in eGovernment initiatives in all Member States, there is an ever-growing democratic deficit with fewer citizens than ever involved in the democratic process.  EuroPetition will work with Citizens to help them rediscover the relevance of local democracy by enabling them to raise issues and also connect with other interested citizens.  With the use of formal tools such as petitioning, users of the service also have a direct route to influence decision makers and to add their views to the mainstream debate.

A 25% increase in participation – most generally in the area of consultations manifested as local ePetitions - is set as an initial target over the 12 months pilot trials in the 5 very different legislative regions across Europe.  The basleline for this increase will be established alongside the technical build phase so that this can be tracked from the start of use of the system.  This increase needs to be looked at with reference to increases in informal participation – such as participation in marketing petitions or in discussion - as well as participation in the formal democratic process – for instance actually signing the petition.  One of the design assumptions in the project is that the informal social network tools are complementing and increasing engagement in the formal democratic process and this will be picked up as part of the evaluation.