Governance in the European Union: A Policy Analysis of the Attempts to Raise Legitimacy through Civil Society Participation

The article focuses on two flagship initiatives - the open method of co-ordination and online consultations - in which the European Union aimed to improve democratic legitimacy through collaborative governance. Offering an analytical framework to scrutinize the large body of existing theoretical and empirical research, the article concludes that not only were the high expectations on the effects of applied governance disappointed, the results also hint at larger, more general implications for the governance concept that, in contrast to the high expectations, appears to be indeed strongly dependent on government-like conditions to operate successfully.