Europeanisation of the electronic public sphere: Theory, institutional culture and online reality

This article, based on the author’s doctoral thesis (Michailidou 2007), focuses on the vertical Europeanisation of the online public debate and more specifically on the European Union’s (EU) online public communication strategy, which is understood here as the topdown process of the unmediated, direct, online communication between the EU and the general public. The theoretical framework of this article is built on two scholarly theoretical debates which have been developing in parallel over the past 10-15 years: The potential democratising impact of the Internet on politics and the conceptual association of the European public sphere with the EU’s democratic deficit. The findings show that over the past few years the European Commission has unambiguously committed to facilitate direct communication with EU citizens as part of the strategy to increase transparency and democratic legitimation of the EU’s decision-making process, while the Internet is seen as a key tool in facilitating direct communication with the public. However, after monitoring three of the EU’s official websites for a year and analyzing the views of 221 Internet users on the EU’s Information and Communication strategy online, it has become evident that the Commission has not yet fulfilled these commitments. Furthermore, the interviews with key Commission officials have revealed that behind this gap between policy and online implementation lays an institutional culture which conflicts with the aims of the Commission’s public communication strategy.