Praktyczny wymiar deliberacji w Unii Europejskiej

The paper concentrates on the project of the European Citizens’ Consultations — Internet-based debate organized in 27 member states — as a measure to tackle democracy deficit and accountability gap in the European Union. The author tries to measure the potential of the Internet as a meeting place of deliberative democracy and its impact on the process of involving European citizens into decision-making in the European Union. In order to grasp a diversified nature of the democratic participation throughout the European Union, the author compares the outputs of the debates in four different member states: Poland, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. The research takes into account not only the number of participants and frequency of their posts — which constitutes a quantitative part of the research — but also the content of the propositions presented by the participants and the final national recommendations — which is an attempt of qualitative analysis of the project.