Inclusion of people in decision-making: The new challenges

Abstract

Reflecting on the May 2019 European Parliament elections, the EU democratic institutions are in need of efficiently responding to the discrepancies between public agendas and policy-making (as shown in the Macedonia naming dispute), and the threatening dynamics of authoritarian populism, as well as to unpredictable reactions from diverse groups and citizens, especially from the neglected, excluded and marginal ones. These citizens cannot handle complexity and react by voting for protest candidates/movements and supporting radical, yet oversimplified and inadequate, solutions to complex problems. Given the potentiality of crisis cascades and that an over-standardized “one size fits all” approach does not work anymore, the EU policy-making experts should arguably turn their analytic attention to existing drivers of political destabilisation by adopting new knowledge bases and sources. This pertains to a fresh theoretical understanding of nonlinear sociopolitical phenomena (from populist reactions of any kind to social media behaviours), that is, a deeper, complexity-friendly approach drawn from new scientific advancements and coupled with innovative policy designs, aimed to rebalance the system and to defend the European project against further failures.