European Summit of Regions and Cities (March 2022)

A panel at the 2020 ESPAS conference discussed the future of democracy in the light of the coronavirus pandemic. Participatory democracy was seen as a potential remedy for polarisation, while digitisation brings a need for careful governance. Misinformation and disinformation needs to be addressed through education. A poll of attendees identified tax equity as a key innovation for successfully rebuilding democracy.

The introduction of a series of promising new tools could offer a potential way to support democratic decision-makers in regulating complexity and tackling ongoing and future challenges. The first of these tools is to use strategic foresight to anticipate and control future events; the second is collective intelligence, following the idea that citizens are collectively capable of providing better solutions to regulatory problems than are public administrations; the third and fourth are concerned with design-thinking and algorithmic regulation respectively. Design-based approaches are credited with opening up innovative options for policy-makers, while algorithms hold the promise of enabling decision-making to handle complex issues while remaining participatory.

The Conference on the Future of Europe is a complex democratic exercise in which the multilingual digital platform gathers ideas from citizens and civil society, citizens' panels give recommendations, and the conference plenary makes proposals on the basis of which the executive board of the Conference will draft the final report. The contribution of the citizens' panels will feed into the proposals of the conference plenary and, ultimately, into the final report of the conference that the executive board will present at the end of the conference for the institutions to follow up.

How has populism transformed party systems in Europe? I survey the varieties of populism, the sources of their support and the different ways that they appeal to voters. : While left populist parties in power over the last decade have tended to become more ordinary, sometimes even shedding antiestablishment and anti-EU positions, ethnopopulist parties in power have used harsh “us-versus-them” appeals, misinformation, and democratic backsliding in their pursuit of more power.

During multiple crises of the last decade, intergovernmental governance has shown its undemocratic effects, thus soliciting a critical reappraisal of the differentiation logic. The federalisation of the EU appears a more promising alternative strategy for advancing integration and, at the same time, meeting the democratic expectations of the EU. This analytical exercise speaks to the Conference on the Future of Europe.