Recent scholarship has drawn on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to provide highly insightful analyses of democratic innovations (Bua Reference Bua2025; Ganuza and Ramos Reference Ganuza and Ramos2026). Using the relational framework developed by the French sociologist, these studies embed democratic innovations within a broader configuration of power relations among professionals of citizen participation and institutional actors – rather than primarily asking whether such innovations produce effects on democracy itself.
In this article, I revisit the contributions offered by this analytical framework to the study of democratic innovations, especially top-down mini-publics.Footnote 1 Through a discussion of the professionals involved with participatory-deliberative formats within the European Union (EU), I show that field theory is indeed useful – but not necessarily for positing the existence of a fully fledged ‘field’ of democratic innovations or of institutionalised citizen participation. As will be seen, the space of actors promoting these formats only imperfectly satisfies the criteria that define a field in the strong Bourdieusian sense. Field theory proves most fruitful, instead, when mobilised within a relational sociological perspective to show, for instance, how democratic innovations form, that I call a reform space, which supplies resources to actors situated within a broader field of power, thereby enabling them to reproduce or renegotiate its internal dynamics.
The article is structured as follows. First, I recall the criteria that define a field. I then review recent contributions that have examined the notion of field(s) in the study of democratic innovations and discuss how the literature on democratic innovations can benefit from a Bourdieusian framework. After the literature review, I present the case study and methodology concerning promoters of mini-publics at the EU level, before demonstrating that this space does not strictly correspond to a field. Finally, I show how analysing this reform space nonetheless sheds light on the dynamics specific to the EU’s field of power.
Literature review
The criteria of the field
In the French version of Practical Reason, Bourdieu defines fields as ‘relatively autonomous social universes […] in which professionals of symbolic production confront one another in struggles whose stakes concern the imposition of legitimate principles of vision and division of the natural and social world’ (Reference Bourdieu1994). From this formulation, several key elements can be extracted, which I will further develop through scholarship drawing on field theory in the political sociology of international relations and of the EU.
First, a field is a ‘fragment’ of the social world, the latter being composed of a multiplicity of fields and social universes. Second, a field is relatively autonomous from other fields or social spaces (Kauppi Reference Kauppi2002: 778) insofar as it is structured by ‘stakes of the game in play’ (Pouliot and Mérand Reference Pouliot, Mérand and Adler-Nissen2013: 36) and by legitimate principles of vision and division that are not necessarily valid beyond its boundaries. Nourished by what Guzzini describes as a ‘self-sustaining autonomy’ (Reference Guzzini and Adler-Nissen2013: 80; read also Swartz Reference Swartz1997: 126), the field is structured around the recognition of a specific form of capital, defined by Pouliot & Mérand as a ‘resource, specific to a field […] which actors aim to accumulate and benefit from’ (Reference Pouliot, Mérand and Adler-Nissen2013: 36). Capital within a field ‘constitutes power resources’, both within that field and potentially across other social spaces (Swartz Reference Swartz1997: 75).
Field sociology sheds light on a double dynamic: first, fields are spaces characterised by forms of cooperation (‘field of forces’: Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1998: 32) – indeed, ‘complicity’ (Guzzini Reference Guzzini and Adler-Nissen2013: 81) – among agents who share an interest in sustaining belief (illusio) in the value of the specific capital at stake. This shared illusio underpins a certain practice, or practical sense, enabling agents to navigate the field and its game (Swartz Reference Swartz1997: 125). At the same time, they are spaces of struggle (‘field of struggles’: Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1998: 32). While these agents are united by a shared belief in, and interest in legitimising, a specific form of capital proper to the field in which they are embedded, they nevertheless struggle over the appropriation of the specific capital of the field (the monopoly of legitimate specific capital) and/or the redefinition of that capital (Swartz Reference Swartz1997: 123). Although this is not explicitly stated in the above quotation from Bourdieu, his broader body of work, and that of scholars working in his legacy, makes clear that capital is unequally distributed among agents (Pouliot and Mérand Reference Pouliot, Mérand and Adler-Nissen2013: 30; Swartz Reference Swartz1997: 123). One can therefore identify opposing ‘poles’ within a field: spiritual/temporal, orthodox/heterodox; and, in the fields of public action, central state/local authorities, senior officials/junior officials, treasury ministers/spending ministers (Dubois Reference Dubois2024; Kauppi Reference Kauppi2002).
Furthermore, Bourdieu identifies a somewhat singular field, namely the field of power characterised by a form of ‘meta-capital’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1998). This field can be defined simultaneously as a ‘field of forces structurally determined by the state of the relations of power among forms of power, or different forms of capital’ and as ‘a field of power struggles among the holders of different forms of power’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1996: 264). This definition of the field as both a field of forces and a field of struggles is taken up, for example, in the editorial project directed by Dubois (Reference Dubois2024), which analyses policies through the lens of field theory, in continuity with Bourdieu’s own work on public policy (Reference Bourdieu2000).
Having recalled these criteria defining the field, it is important to stress that the concept is more aptly suited to certain social spaces than to others (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2022: 580). A field is defined by actors who share a form of self-referentiality and a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis other spaces or fields. The argument advanced in this article is directed against an inflationary tendency to invoke the notion of field in order to characterise highly heterogeneous social spaces, which should instead be described as a ‘reform space’, which is a resource space, for one or several fields.
Why Bourdieu’s field theory matters for the study of democratic innovations
Field theory has already been mobilised in studies examining public policy domains within states (Dubois Reference Dubois2024). One may also point to the sociology of elites (Denord, Palme and Réau Reference Denord, Palme and Réau2020). The approach has also gained visibility in International Relations (Adler-Nissen Reference Adler-Nissen2013a). It has likewise been employed in studies of European integration, both at a general level (Georgakakis and Rowell Reference Georgakakis and Rowell2013; Kauppi Reference Kauppi2002) and in more focused analyses, including research on the European diplomatic field (Adler-Nissen Reference Adler-Nissen and Adler-Nissen2013b), European Defence Policy (Mérand Reference Mérand2008), legal professionals (Vauchez Reference Vauchez2008), parliamentarians (Crum and Fossum Reference Crum and Fossum2009), or civil society actors (Johansson and Kalm Reference Johansson and Kalm2015).
In a recent article published in this Journal, Ganuza and Ramos (Reference Ganuza and Ramos2026) mobilise field theory to analyse democratic innovations, an approach that remains relatively uncommon in the study of democratic innovations. My paper is a response to their study, considering that their use of the concept is analytically misleading and demonstrates that a more rigorous application yields substantively different results. In their work, Ganuza and Ramos aim to recontextualise democratic innovations within historically situated social configurations structured by power relations. Such a perspective, inscribed within a ‘relational mode of reasoning’ characteristic of field theory (Swartz Reference Swartz1997: 119), contrasts with more functionalist strands of the literature, which primarily examine whether democratic innovations respond to contemporary democratic challenges, while ‘hid[ing] specific relationships of struggle between the different actors that delimit the field of institutional participation’ (Ganuza and Ramos Reference Ganuza and Ramos2026: 427).
In this section, I engage with both the work of Ganuza and Ramos (Reference Ganuza and Ramos2026) and a contribution by Bua (Reference Bua2025), who also mobilises the concept of field to analyse democratic innovations, albeit in a somewhat different manner. I begin with Bua before turning to Ganuza and Ramos.
The work of Bua (Reference Bua2025) reconstructs what he calls a ‘field of participation’, positioned at the intersection between a field of power that tends to domesticate or depoliticise democratic innovations and more disruptive participatory practices that remain less controlled by institutional actors. This reconstruction is useful for showing how political and institutional actors may attempt to co-opt democratic innovations to enhance their legitimacy within the field of power, and how other actors may resist such co-optation. Bua’s study is also highly informative for demonstrating that institutional actors located within the field of power are sometimes exposed to pressure from social movements demanding that institutional democratic innovations become more disruptive – that is, capable of improving rather than merely reproducing the existing political order. However, the main limitation of this approach lies in the tendency to reify this space as a field endowed with its own specific capital, referred to as ‘participatory capital’.
Bua argues that this capital is composed of several types of actors who pursue different political strategies. Some possess an ‘adversarial participatory capital’, accumulated through contention and rooted primarily in what Mathieu calls the ‘space of social movements’ (Reference Mathieu2021; Mathieu explicitly refrains from designating this space as a field of social movements). Others hold an ‘institutionalised participatory capital’, positioning them much closer to formal institutions. This conceptualisation appears problematic insofar as it subsumes distinct political strategies under a single concept by invoking a ‘participatory field’. The difficulty with speaking of participatory capital lies in the fact that the various participatory strategies it encompasses are not recognised by the same instances of legitimation: institutionalised participatory capital tends to be validated within the political field, whereas adversarial forms are acknowledged primarily within the space of social movements (or correspond to the insurgent capital that Bua also mentions). In other words, what Bua characterises as capital and sub-capitals are better understood as different strategies for democratising society. They do not, however, point to a unified field or to a self-referential social space in a field. Professionals of democratic innovations – whom I refer to below as reformers, insofar as they are close to the field of power without necessarily seeking to reproduce the existing status quo – are driven by a highly procedural and codified conception of ‘democracy’, in contrast to the more radical or ‘wild’ conceptions emerging from social movements. Analytically, it is therefore problematic to subsume under a single concept social spaces marked by sharply divergent democratic visions, political strategies, habitus structures, and social properties. From this perspective, it becomes difficult to identify the defining properties of a genuine ‘participatory field’: its degree of self-referentiality, the existence of clear and stable boundaries between members and non-members, and the presence of autonomous principles of hierarchisation. The space under study appears instead to be fluid, reflecting struggles over legitimate ways of participating politically as a citizen, whether within the political field, within the broader field of power, or through social movement arenas.
Compared to Bua, Ganuza and Ramos (Reference Ganuza and Ramos2026) have a more focused approach, as they focus on what they term the ‘institutional participatory field’ in Spain; that is, reformers located close to the field of power, rather than on activists advancing more radical and contentious democratic imaginaries. In this respect, their analysis is closer to the perspective I develop in this paper. By mobilising field theory, Ganuza and Ramos introduce historical depth and demonstrate how the legitimation of these participatory instruments has generated relationships among different actors competing to shape the trajectory and meaning of democratic innovations. While mobilising the concept of field to develop a relational sociology is undoubtedly fruitful, relational sociology is by no means the preserve of field theory alone. Concepts such as configuration, as developed by Norbert Elias (Reference Elias1978), or social space in the sense proposed by Mathieu (Reference Mathieu2021), likewise make it possible to analyse the webs of interdependence linking actors within a given sphere of activities and practices (with a certain self-referentiality), without necessarily conceptualising it as a field. Furthermore, even if using field theory to historically contextualise the trajectory of democratic innovations and the struggles over their meaning can also be found in other works, for example on Portugal (Falanga Reference Falanga2026) or in Europe more broadly (Bua Reference Bua2025), this is not sufficient to justify speaking of a field. Studies that seek to historicise democratic innovations within national contexts are able to do so without invoking the notion of a field. For instance, Mazeaud and Nonjon (Reference Mazeaud and Nonjon2018) reconstruct the history and map the professional milieu of citizen participation in France, referring instead to a ‘reform nebula’ (Topalov Reference Topalov1999) or a ‘market’ rather than to a field. A similar socio-historical approach is found in the study of citizen participation in Spain by Martínez-Palacios and Mazeaud (Reference Martínez-Palacios, Mazeaud and Paño Yáñez2019), which analyses the evolution of participatory practices without positing the existence of an autonomous field of democratic participation.
Moreover, although Ganuza and Ramos (Reference Ganuza and Ramos2026) underline several times the heteronomous relationship between what they call the ‘institutional participatory field’ and the field of power, this does not prevent them from accrediting the idea that democratic innovations form a specific field. If one can observe a certain degree of referentiality within the space studied by Ganuza and Ramos, they do not demonstrate its proper autonomy in relation to the field of power, which is nevertheless a key criterion of a field. Then, to qualify as a field, one would need to specify what constitutes the specific capital of the space they study: are the ‘epistemic capital’ and the ‘representative capital’ they refer to exclusive to, or specific to, a field of institutionalised citizen participation? Furthermore, for a participatory or deliberative resource to qualify as capital, it would need to be recognised by instances of legitimation distinct from those of the field of power. But the two scholars state: ‘The configuration of the participatory spaces themselves was conditioned by the public powers’ (Reference Ganuza and Ramos2026: 430). Saying it differently, the value of democratic innovations generally depends on the recognition by actors embedded in the field of power, rather than constituting an autonomous space in which the value of democratic innovations would be established in and of itself. In other words, their legitimacy is not produced internally, according to specific and relatively autonomous principles of evaluation, but remains subordinated to political and institutional validation – a condition that prevents this space from qualifying as a field. Moreover, to speak of a field of democratic innovations, one would also need to identify barriers to entry (Mauger Reference Mauger2023). Absent such criteria, it seems analytically more rigorous to speak of a reform space, or a resource space, rather than of a field.
In what follows, considering the space of institutionalised democratic innovation promoters at the EU level, I argue that it is not appropriate to speak of a proper field. I rather propose to conceptualise it – in order to distinguish it from a field properly so called – as a ‘reform space’ that acts as a resource space. I contend that the theory of fields remains analytically useful even if I examine a social space that does not constitute a field in the strict sense. Indeed, I seek to show how the space structured around the promotion of democratic innovations at the EU level may serve the interests of certain (EU) actors within the field of power, relative to others, by providing symbolic, institutional, or professional resources that can be mobilised in ongoing power struggles.
Data and methods
In this paper, I do not use field theory to historicise the trajectory of democratic innovations in the European Union, as this has already been addressed in previous work (Bailly Reference Bailly2026). Instead, the objective is to capture the configuration of actors promoting mini-publics at the level of the European Union and to analyse how they are positioned within the broader field of EU power, defined as the ‘field of Eurocracy’, understood as a space in which ‘different agents [institutional or not] of diverse origins and profiles […] are in permanent struggle to define the meaning of the EU and the legitimate properties required to govern it’ (Georgakakis Reference Georgakakis2012: 6). If this field is only weakly open to lay actors, that is, if it constitutes a field of multiple competing elites, then it is structured by relations between dominant and dominated agents (Denord, Palme and Réau Reference Denord, Palme and Réau2020: 6), as well as between more autonomous and more heteronomous actors (Kauppi Reference Kauppi2002, 778). Georgakakis and Rowell mention the distinction between ‘temporary’ (part-timers) and ‘permanents’, arguing that the latter occupy more dominant positions than the former (Reference Georgakakis and Rowell2013: 12). However, this distinction, which provides what might be called a causality of the probable, is not always empirically valid. Intermittent actors, for instance, may leave durable institutional traces (Drach and Mourlon-Druol Reference Drach and Mourlon-Druol2025), while in the present case some of the permanents examined nonetheless occupy dominated positions within the field. Moreover, several scholars have argued that the field of Eurocracy contains relatively autonomous subfields, such as those structured around parliamentarians (Crum and Fossum Reference Crum and Fossum2009; Kauppi Reference Kauppi2002) or Euro-lawyers and legal professionals (Vauchez Reference Vauchez2008). Yet, as this article will show, this does not appear to be the case for democratic innovations.
I conducted a long-term field investigation between 2021 and 2025. During this period, I participated in several mini-publics organised by European institutions, including the Conference on the Future of Europe (2021–2022), the new generation of citizen panels developed by the European Commission (2022–2025), the transnational dialogues organised by the Committee of the Regions (2021), and pilot projects led by the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (2021).
In addition, I conducted 55 interviews with what can be termed, following Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu2000), ‘efficient agents’; that is, actors who exert influence in the promotion and valorisation of mini-publics at the EU level (online Appendix 1). Concretely, I interviewed professionals of EU mini-publics, drawn both from EU institutions (the Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the EU, the European Committee of the Regions/CoR, and the European Economic and Social Committee/EESC) and from think tanks, foundations, and deliberative consultancy firms. I asked them about their professional trajectories, the reasons they believe mini-publics should be organised at the level of the EU, their views on the participation of ordinary citizens in the EU, and the ways in which they promote or organise mini-publics in practice.
Beyond attendance at EU mini-publics, I also attended 37 events organised by EU institutions, think tanks, and foundations devoted to discussing mini-publics, and in some cases, advocating for the institutionalisation of permanent mini-public designs (online Appendix 2). This enabled me to map the actors mobilised around mini-publics specifically at the level of the EU, and, above all, to identify their recurrent social properties. Such a mapping makes it possible to examine the extent to which these actors are distinctive within the field of Eurocracy (Georgakakis and Rowell Reference Georgakakis and Rowell2013). The analysis thus seeks to situate these actors within the broader configuration of power relations structuring this space.
One clarification is needed here. One might object that this article reduces democratic innovations to mini-publics, even though democratic innovations extend far beyond mini-publics alone (Smith Reference Smith2009). First, several forms of democratic innovation simply do not exist at the EU level, such as participatory budgeting or community policing (Fung and Wright Reference Fung and Wright2003), for instance. Moreover, my investigation was initially broader than a sole focus on reformers promoting mini-publics since the early 2000s. Rather, it examined all those who advocated reforms intended, directly or indirectly, to increase citizens’ political prerogatives within the history of European integration (see Bailly Reference Bailly2026). If this article concentrates on several mini-publics, it is because, within the particular conjuncture of the 2010s and 2020s, they came to be regarded by the reformers under study as the most salient democratic innovation. This is evident in a range of reformers’ reports that cannot be analysed in detail here: they routinely assess existing citizen participation mechanisms, and these evaluations consistently portray mini-publics, sometimes labelled by themselves as citizens’ assemblies, as the most ‘modern’ and promising democratic innovation to invest in.Footnote 2 During this fieldwork, I met advocates of the popular initiative that eventually gave rise to the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). Although many expressed disappointment with this instrument, they nevertheless remained active within the reform space surrounding mini-publics that I observed. Consequently, this study does not exclusively concern mini-publics. Rather, the spaces dedicated to promoting mini-publics bring together a broader variety of actors committed to democratic innovations more generally.
Results: Studying a reform space as the professionals of EU mini-publics
The boundaries of the reform space
The professionals of EU mini-publics constitute a set of actors operating within, or more precisely at the margins of, the European field of power, seeking to promote deliberative-participatory formats that invite randomly selected citizens to engage in dialogue on European policies, formulating opinions and recommendations in specific policy domains. This space mobilises a range of intellectual resources and forms of expertise about Europe, and inscribes itself within the long history of attempts to democratise European integration – that is, to conceptualise the European polity as a political entity that ought to correspond to democratic standards. In this respect, it represents the most recent reformist pathway aimed at addressing what has been described since the 1970s as the ‘democratic legitimacy deficit’ of European integration. The first mini-publics at the EU level date back to the early 2000s. Although this space remains subordinate, as will be shown, it has gained relative symbolic prominence since 2020, particularly following the organisation of the Conference on the Future of Europe (COFOE). This growing visibility is evidenced by the acceleration of participatory-deliberative formats – taken up by the Commission through a new generation of citizen panels, by the DG for Regional and Urban Policy and the DG for Environment, as well as by the multiplication of practitioner networks supported by the CoR, the EESC (Bailly Reference Bailly2026). The consolidation of these initiatives does not necessarily signal the emergence of an autonomous field. Rather, it suggests the increasing availability of deliberative-participatory resources that may be mobilised by actors embedded in the broader field of Eurocracy, in ongoing struggles over the meaning, legitimacy, and governance of European integration.
I identified 394 actors active within this space. To construct this sample, I systematically recorded all individuals – representatives of European or national institutions, academics, deliberative consultants, and staff members of associations, think tanks, and foundations – who met at least one of the following criteria:
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• they contributed to the implementation of EU participatory-deliberative formats (from Meeting of Minds in 2005, to the initiatives launched under the Commission’s ‘Plan D for Democracy, Dialogue and Debate’ between 2005 and 2009, and more recently the new generation of citizen panels organised by the European Commission between 2022 and 2024);
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• they participated in conferences, seminars, hearings, or study days devoted to reflecting on citizen participation at EU level, or events often initiated by European institutions (notably DG Communication and the Joint Research Centre of the Commission, parliamentary hearings within the European Parliament/EP, as well as initiatives of the CoR or the EESC), but also by foundations such as the Bertelsmann Stiftung and think tanks including the European Policy Centre (EPC and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). These events – systematically observed since 2021 – place deliberative approaches at the core of debates on participatory reform in the EU.
Among these 394 actors, 178 belong to European institutions. Eighty are affiliated with the Commission, including members of the cabinets of Commissioners Margot Wallström (2004–2009) and Dubravka Šuica (2019–2024), 26 officials from DG Communication, and 8 from the Joint Research Centre. Thirty-eight belong to the EP (including 20 members of the European Parliament), 9 to the Council of the EU, 9 to the EESC, and 8 to the CoR. In addition, nine actors come from the ‘Open Government’ unit of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which collaborates closely with EU institutions on participatory governance issues.
The remaining 216 actors can be described as non-institutional reformers. This group includes 58 academics;Footnote 3 11 members of federalist associations;Footnote 4 12 affiliated with Missions Publiques, and 14 with Institute for Organisational Communication (IFOK; both deliberative consultancy firms); 8 from the Bertelsmann Stiftung; 8 from the EPC (among a total of 18 actors drawn from think tanks such as CEPS and Notre Europe); 4 from Mehr Demokratie/ECI Campaign; 4 from Democracy International; 4 from the European Citizen Action Service; and 2 from the King Baudouin Foundation.
So far, I can argue that among these reformers, the majority work outside the European institutions rather than within them, which already suggests that this structurally limits their capacity to convert participatory-deliberative resources into a key resource of the EU field of power. Among non-institutional actors, permanent actors – to use the distinction proposed by Georgakakis and Rowell (Reference Georgakakis and Rowell2013) – who are fully engaged with issues of European citizen participation are rare. Think tanks work on mini-publics and democratic reforms alongside a range of other topics, even when they are fully based in Brussels. Deliberative consultancy firms, foundations, and academics tend to engage with specific mini-publics or when they are commissioned by institutions, but for the most part they return to their national fields to continue their activities. As for permanent institutional actors who do possess European institutional capital, the next section shows that they are rather dominated within the EU institutional field. Finally, except for a minority (at the Joint Research Centre (JRC), DG Communication, or the CoR), institutional actors have only recently been working for the EU, typically for less than a decade. Youth (and lack of lasting experience) participation in the field is, moreover, a marker of heterodoxy, expressed through a desire to steer the Eurocratic field towards a more democratic horizon.
Furthermore, the gender distribution shows a relative male predominance: 219 men (56%) and 175 women (45%). This contrasts, for instance, with the Commission (2026 data),Footnote 5 where women are more represented than men across all employment categories (57.2% compared to 42.8% of men, even though their presence decreases as one moves up the hierarchy of positions within the institution).
In terms of nationality, these reformers originate primarily from the founding Member States of European integration: 59 are German, 57 French, 40 Belgian, 35 Italian, and 21 Dutch (with only 2 Luxembourgers). There are also 24 British, 21 Spanish, and 12 Irish actors, pointing to a strong overrepresentation of Western European trajectories within this reform space.
As is the case for the majority of actors working in the field of Eurocracy, these reformers are highly educated: 123 hold a doctoral degree, and 197 have at least a master’s degree. However, among the reformers under scrutiny, 161 have graduated in political science, 45 in law, 43 in economics, and 9 in history. These data suggest that this space does not reflect broader macro-level trends observable within the EU bureaucratic field, where legal (Vauchez Reference Vauchez2008; see also Cohen and Vauchez Reference Cohen and Vauchez2007) and, increasingly, economic training tend to be more highly valued within the administrative elite of the EU: Alayrac (Reference Alayrac2022), Drach and Mourlon-Druol (Reference Drach and Mourlon-Druol2025), Georgakakis (Reference Georgakakis2017). The most frequently attended universities include the French Instituts d’Etudes Politiques (28), as well as Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University (11 graduates). Belgian universities are also strongly represented, including Université catholique de Louvain (13), Université libre de Bruxelles (11), and KU Leuven (5). The British elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge together account for 18 individuals, while the University of Maastricht accounts for 7. Two highly Europeanized academic institutions – the European University Institute (15 individuals) and the College of Europe (10 individuals), sometimes described as forming a European educational ‘nobility’, ultimately concern a relatively small share of EU professionals within democratic innovations.
Beyond educational trajectories, it is noteworthy that 148 individuals – nearly half of the sample – remain professionally linked to academia by teaching or participating in university research networks. These educational profiles and relationships to knowledge production position most reformers at the intersection between the Eurocratic field and national academic fields, as will be discussed below. Finally, 108 individuals display, at some point in their trajectory, forms of partisan engagement.
In terms of age distribution, 191 individuals are under 50 years old (including 156 between 30 and 49 years old), 86 are in their fifties, and 86 are over 60 years old. This thus constitutes a relatively young social space. This is not surprising if these actors are interpreted as ‘protagonists of change’, seeking to modify the existing division of political labour within the European field of power, against ‘apostles of law’ and guardians of the order (Kauppi Reference Kauppi2002: 778). Beyond their youth, heterodoxy is also reflected in the overrepresentation of political science, which is not a dominant training pathway within the EU field, as well as in the fact that the institutional actors who engage in the reform space tend to belong to weaker or more heteronomous segments.
The next step is to examine why this reform space cannot be considered a field, even though the analytical use of field theory remains valuable for studying it.
A minimally regulated space
To analyse the structuring dynamics of a social space, one can examine the existence of explicit or tacit rules capable of sustaining a shared habitus and illusio (in the case that the space would correspond to the definition of a field). Considering the reform space under study, several elements do generate a degree of self-referentiality, although this remains insufficient to characterise one configuration of actors as a field. First, the actors studied share the normative belief that the European Union should be understood and evaluated as a democratic political entity. This position is not self-evident, since European integration has historically also been conceptualised in more technocratic or intergovernmental terms (Sternberg Reference Sternberg2013). As a consequence, these reformers tend to consider the EU as suffering from a persistent democratic legitimacy deficit and view the expansion of mini-publics as a primary pathway for addressing this perceived structural entropy. Within this perspective, the multiplication of participatory-deliberative formats (such as mini-publics) is interpreted as a means of strengthening the democratic grounding of European policies:
the European democratic deficit justifies a sustained effort to support European democratic praxis”; “The European demos cannot exist without deliberation. (Boucher Reference Boucher2006)
[…] a modern European democracy must become more innovative and participatory. Citizens must be given opportunities to participate directly in political discussion and decision-making processes. Without this participation, without the acceptance and the willingness of citizens to participate, it will not be possible to meet the challenges of the future […]. (Bertelsmann Stiftung/Committee of the Regions 2022)
[…] the challenge is […] a large-scale test of decision-makers’ capacity to listen to citizens and take their views into account. (Missions publiques 2021)
Regularly, these reformers criticise earlier doctrines of democratising the European Union, which they consider partial and ultimately inconclusive – for example, attempts to ‘parliamentarise’ the EU (seen as a necessary but insufficient condition for democratisation), or efforts to encourage the increasing involvement of non-market civil society actors in consultations organised by the European Commission. Moreover, existing citizen participation mechanisms implemented by the EU are often criticised when they do not meet the quality ‘standards’ promoted by reformers. For instance, a consultant from the Bertelsmann Stiftung (a German foundation established in 1977, active at the EU level on democratic innovations since the 2010s) highlighted during an interview, the relatively low ‘deliberative quality’ of the citizen dialogues previously organised by the European Commission:
Most of the dialogues [between non-randomly selected citizens and a Commissioner] are essentially question-and-answer exercises; they are not very deliberative […]. We therefore contacted the European Commission, demonstrating that we had relevant expertise, and they were interested […]. We helped them coordinate several projects on an experimental basis. We introduced new elements, such as transnationality, sortition, and the deliberative character of the process. (Interview with a consultant from Bertelsmann Stiftung, 8 June 2022)
A similar critical assessment was expressed by a civil servant working in the communication unit of the CoR, when discussing the participatory mechanisms developed by the European Commission:
I have been familiar with these events [including citizen dialogues] for about twenty years. It is always the same pattern – some committed participants and occasionally a critic who says that the Commission is useless. It is the usual routine of politicians […]. It is not enough to simply listen to citizens; they must be taken seriously, properly informed, selected through sortition, and their recommendations should be transmitted to the European Parliament. (Interview with a civil servant from the European Committee of the Regions, March 24th, 2021)
Finally, let us cite an example from a consultant at Missions Publiques (a Franco-Belgian deliberative consultancy created in 1998), who described the ‘Citizen Agoras’ organised by the European Parliament in the early 2010s in the following terms: “Neither sortition nor genuine deliberation was involved […]. Many operations were labeled as ‘citizen’ initiatives when, in reality, 500 people were simply brought into the European Parliament to listen to members of the European Parliament” (interview with a consultant from Missions Publiques, July 13th, 2022).
In a sense, it can be argued that the reformers are united by a shared criticism of the existing offer of EU participatory-deliberative formats. Beyond these interview excerpts, there are also published books and reports documenting these criticisms of existing mechanisms, notably from think tanks such as the Centre for European Policy Studies (Blockmans and Russack Reference Blockmans and Russack2018), from the Bertelsmann Stiftung (Bertelsmann/CoR 2022), as well as from academics (Alemanno and Organ Reference Alemanno and Organ2021) who are themselves engaged in reform-oriented initiatives (Alemanno Reference Alemanno2022). This criticism is articulated in the name of consensual standards – which themselves constitute a tacit rule of the social space under study – concerning what should count as a ‘good’ mini-public format or a ‘good’ democratic innovation. For these reformers, such formats are valuable only if they satisfy three core criteria, which can be summarised, following a publication of the Bertelsmann Stiftung (Bertelsmann/CoR 2022), as inclusiveness (random selection of a diverse panel of ordinary citizens drawn from several countries), deliberation (ensured through ‘structured exchanges of different opinions and experiences in small groups leading to common proposals’), and effectiveness (involving ‘political and administrative decision-makers in the dialogues’ and ensuring ‘follow-up implementation of certain proposals at local, regional, and European levels’). Thus, a relatively codified normative standard is observable within the social space studied here. During the fieldwork, these criteria were never fundamentally challenged, suggesting the existence of a shared practical consensus among actors. This normative codification contributes to structuring the internal logic of distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ participatory-deliberative formats and reinforces the valorisation of ambitious, high-quality formats: ‘[…] the panels [of the Conference on the Future of the European Union] will comply with a set of quality criteria developed and tested by participation practitioners and scholars over the past 50 years (Missions publiques 2021)’; ‘Citizen proposals can be integrated into decision-making only if the process is properly planned’ (a consultant from Missions Publiques, during a participant observation, at a roundtable organised on 18 October 2021).
Thus, reformers under scrutiny share common evaluative criteria, that is, shared categories of understanding: the EU’s democratic deficit and the need to reform through mini-publics.
Beyond these consensual criteria, the reformers also share symbolic references that they mobilise in the reports and toolkits they produce. In the public reports they produced, frequent references are made to the OECD report on the ‘deliberative turn’ (OECD 2020) as well as to academic specialists in democratic innovations, including Loïc Blondiaux, Yves Sintomer, Hélène Landemore, David Farrell, Jane Suiter, and James Fishkin, as well as scholars associated with alternative theories of representative democracy such as Pierre Rosanvallon, Michael Saward, Robert Dahl, and Bernard Manin (Boucher Reference Boucher2006). Intertextuality is also observable in the way these reformers cite one another’s work. For example, Gaëtane Ricard-Nihoul (a senior civil servant in the DG Communication responsible for citizen participation) cites in one report the work of Dominik Hierlemann (from the Bertelsmann Stiftung), Alberto Alemanno, Sophie Russack (from the CEPS), Antoine Vergne (from Missions Publiques, cited for his doctoral work on sortition), as well as publications jointly produced by the CoR and the Bertelsmann Stiftung (Ricard-Nihoul Reference Ricard-Nihoul2020). This is also the case when an analyst from the EPC – present at all events related to EU mini-publics – cites in one of his publications on the evaluation of the new generation of Commission citizen panels, the reports co-authored by Dominik Hierlemann with other academics-reformers (scholactivists) such as Gabriele Abels or Alberto Alemanno, concerning the institutionalisation of mini-publics at the EU level (EPC 2022a).
The presence of these references further illustrates the intertwining of scholarly knowledge and practitioner knowledge, which also translates into a shared universe of practices: implementing mini-publics (or pilots), writing policy notes and reports evaluating participatory-deliberative formats implemented by European institutions (often borrowing academic standards; Missions publiques 2022; Bertelsmann 2019; EPC 2022b); producing methodological guides aimed at promoting ‘good’ practices in terms of mini-publics (Bertelsmann Stiftung, n.d.; Kind Baudouin Foundation 2006; Notre Europe 2005) and developing the ability to communicate within the confined European public sphere (Eriksen Reference Eriksen2005). This requires not only rhetorical and argumentative skills but also access to social resources and visibility in order to be invited to meetings on the ‘future of European democracy’ organised by the EESC, the CoR, the Joint Research Centre/Competence Center on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy, or to publish opinion pieces and be interviewed by EU media outlets (Kind Baudouin and IFOK 2007; Alemanno et al. Reference Alemanno, Davenport and Batalla2024).
Beyond these discursive elements and shared practices, which establish a limited form of self-referentiality within the space, it is also necessary to consider the role of conflict – a central criterion in the theory of field (Dubois Reference Dubois2024; Mauger Reference Mauger2023; Pouliot and Mérand Reference Pouliot, Mérand and Adler-Nissen2013; Swartz Reference Swartz1997), often summarised as the idea of the field as simultaneously a ‘field of forces’ and a ‘field of struggles’. In the case studied here, conflict takes a particular form. It is quite different from Ganuza and Ramos (Reference Ganuza and Ramos2026), where reformers compete with one another by each legitimising different democratic innovations. In my case study, there is a consensus around the mini-public as an instrument to genuinely democratise the EU, through the importance of random selection, the contradictory preparation of citizens with experts, and the moderation of discussions by professional facilitators (Abels et al. Reference Abels, Alemanno, Crum, Demidov, Hierlemann, Renkamp and Trechsel2022; Alemanno Reference Alemanno2022; Bertelsmann Stiftung/CoR 2022; Missions publiques 2021; Nets4Dem 2025). The agreement also relies on the principle that EU institutions should act on citizens’ recommendations. Conflicts exist, but they are relatively limited at the epistemic level: they concern, for instance, the number of days a mini-public should last, the number of citizens to be selected, or the institution to which mini-publics should be attached (Abels et al. Reference Abels, Alemanno, Crum, Demidov, Hierlemann, Renkamp and Trechsel2022; Nicolaïdis and Bauböck Reference Nicolaïdis and Bauböck2025). The existing conflicts are in fact less epistemic than infra-ideational; rather, they relate to struggles among reformers over ownership of mini-publics and over attracting the attention and favour of European public authorities. Although I have demonstrated that they may collaborate or cite one another, they nevertheless develop initiatives in parallel (in competition). Put differently, various reformers replicate the same initiatives. For instance, reformers produce different evaluations of mini-publics organised by the Commission (Democratic Society et al. 2022; EPC et al. 2022; EPC 2023) they propose alternative designs for the institutionalisation of permanent mini-publics;Footnote 6 they provide parallel training to promote mini-publics at the European scale;Footnote 7 and they organise practitioner networksFootnote 8 to disseminate the ‘proper’ criteria that should guide citizen deliberation.Footnote 9 The weakness of epistemic conflict may partly stem from the subordinate position of the reform space vis-à-vis the field of Eurocracy. This subordination is explained in part by the fact that the specific resource associated with mini-publics and sortition appears relatively misaligned with the dominant logics of the EU field of power, which is primarily bureaucratic rather than political, and increasingly shaped by processes of economisation (Alayrac Reference Alayrac2022; Georgakakis Reference Georgakakis2017; Schmidt Reference Schmidt2020) in which demotic resources are relatively devalued compared to technical expertise. This situation of subordination does not, however, prevent certain institutional actors who are relatively dominated within the Eurocratic field from investing in this reform space.
To sum up, the space studied here is characterised by minimal regulation, which is not the same as no regulation at all. It includes events/gatherings, shared references and representations (a proto-form of doxa), and common practices. However, it is difficult to speak of a specific habitus or a distinct form of capital specific to this space that would render it autonomous. Indeed, the notion of a ‘participatory capital’ (Bua Reference Bua2025) or ‘capital in the institutional participatory field’ (Ganuza and Ramos Reference Ganuza and Ramos2026) would be questionable. Indeed, the value attributed to a professional of EU mini-publics depends notably on their ability to design, promote, or evaluate a participatory-deliberative format when the latter takes shape within the field of Eurocracy, that is, when the citizen formats are invested by institutional segments. The fact that there are very few autonomous formats outside institutional settings illustrates this point.Footnote 10 At the EU (but also, I assume, in national political field levels), an individual’s or an organisation’s ‘participatory capital’ is typically recognised/valuable only when it is associated with the creation or endorsement of a participatory-deliberative format within the broader field of power.
A symbolic resource for certain dominated segments of the field of Eurocracy
Now that I have shown that the space has a certain self-referentiality, it is not sufficient to characterise it as an autonomous field vis-à-vis the Eurocratic field; it is necessary to examine how field theory can help us understand how reform spaces contribute to resourcing certain actors within more structured fields of power.
As expressed in the portrait of the members of this reform space, it attracts some specific institutional actors. This support and investment takes the form of transfers from institutions to non-institutional reformers (think tanks, academics, deliberative consultants, foundations, etc.) in the form of EU-level financial resources – used, for example, to organise or evaluate mini-publics – along with the provision of physical spaces for meetings and bureaucratic attention that functions as a form of symbolic capital for EU professionals in democratic innovation (granting them voice and recognition).
From the perspective of institutional actors, investing in the reform space must be understood in relation to the symbolic and convertible resources that this space can provide within the Eurocratic field. As in other reform spaces, the returns associated with the value of a resource (or capital) valued in such milieus are often ‘to be harvested elsewhere’ (Topalov Reference Topalov1999: 469).
It is certainly no coincidence that the institutional actors investing in the reform space are not dominant actors within the field of Eurocracy (for the EESC and the CoR: Hönnige and Panke Reference Hönnige and Panke2016; for the DG Communication: Aldrin Reference Aldrin, Georgakakis and Rowell2013). For AFCO MEPs, this is not strictly speaking a weak segment, since it possesses a certain authority as a ‘site of intellectual foresight legitimised by the Union’s political agenda’, albeit ‘without the attribution of real legislative power’ (Beauvallet et al. Reference Beauvallet, Godmer, Marrel and Michon2009: 87). However, analyses of the broader devaluation of the European Parliament are also not uncommon (Sacriste Reference Sacriste2024; White Reference White2020).
Investing in such reform space is therefore strategic for several reasons. For some institutional actors, proximity to non-institutional advocates of democratic innovations mobilises a wide set of intellectual resources and knowledge about Europe. It also continues a long historical trajectory of attempts to democratise European integration and represents the most recent and politically low-cost reformist pathway to address what has long been described as the ‘democratic legitimacy deficit’ of European integration. In other words, it is a matter of accumulating knowledge about mini-publics, building networks, and forging alliances with non-institutional actors who possess forms of governmental knowledge (Robert and Vauchez Reference Robert and Vauchez2010), allowing them to criticise the current state of the field in order to influence its orientation.
If participatory-deliberative formats represent a minor political resource, and if the social properties of the reformers studied show that they are misaligned with the dominant forms of capital at the core of the field of Eurocracy, it should nevertheless be noted that the practice of participatory-deliberative formats enjoys a high degree of symbolic recognition, including from Ursula von der Leyen and Emmanuel Macron. Indeed, in her 2022 State of the Union address, Von der Leyen affirmed the necessity of organising ‘citizen panels’ (thus extending, beyond the Conference on the Future of Europe, the practice of sortition at the EU level). This means that participatory-deliberative formats, which can be understood as a specific resource of cultural capital (alongside other scholarly or juridical resources: Mauger Reference Mauger2023: 204), enjoy a certain degree of symbolic credit. Thus, institutional promoters of participatory-deliberative formats can rely on highly symbolic and strategically valuable forms of support. As Bourdieu emphasises: ‘the legitimacy of power is measured by the recognition granted to it’ (Reference Bourdieu2022: 639).
For institutional actors investing in the space studied here, making the case for involving ordinary citizens in European policy discussions is also a way of asserting political existence at the core of the Eurocratic field, in relation to segments of European actors perceived as more powerful or more central. These actors seek to consolidate their institutional prerogatives through the impulse and coordination of new participatory-deliberative formats that have continued to expand at EU level across various policy domains (such as environment and digital policy). For the DG Communication – often limited to support functions and not considered among the ‘mainstream’ DGs (Sacriste Reference Sacriste2014) – and for the EESC and CoR, which are consultative bodies seeking institutional renewal due to recurring questions about their utility (Bailly Reference Bailly2026), developing European participatory-deliberative formats while associating themselves with it may allow them to participate in policy configurations where they are not usually involved (eg environment, education, foreign affairs, and digital policy). It is no coincidence that the DG Communication (Commission 2001, 2005), the CoR (2009), and the EESC (1992) have long defended the principle of citizen participation in that they develop events to further promote mini-publics.Footnote 11
For involved MEPs, let’s precise that they are not just any MEPs. They are often federalist-oriented (European Parliament 2021; 2023), members of the Spinelli Group and of the parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Affairs (AFCO), and associated with the ‘public’ pole of the European Parliament (Sacriste Reference Sacriste2014). With parliamentary civil servants who increasingly participate in participatory-deliberative formats in meetings at EU level, there is a strategic interest in ‘parliamentarising’ such formats (Reuchamps and Sautter Reference Reuchamps and Sautter2022). Especially since mini-publics – at least in the context of the Conference on the Future of Europe – have generated demands aimed at strengthening the EP’s weight vis-à-vis other institutional partners (see Bailly Reference Bailly2025). This strategic interest predates the COFOE, as the AFCO committee organised hearings involving external experts who promoted mini-publics.Footnote 12
Thus, by investing in the space of EU professionals in democratic innovation, these institutional actors hope to influence (and redirect) the ‘complexity of legitimisation circuits’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2022: 642), since legitimation is never fixed, given that there exists a ‘plurality of competing principles of hierarchisation within the field of power’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2022: 644). They seek to enhance the democratic quality of the European Union. Despite uncertain chances of success, this investment is part of a ‘permanent struggle for the imposition of the dominating principle of domination and, simultaneously, for the […] transformation of the structure of power within the field of power’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2022: 637) in the European community context.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have shown how the richness of field theory can be mobilised through the case of participatory-deliberative formats, and more specifically mini-publics at the level of the EU. I have demonstrated that the space studied – bringing together actors from institutions, foundations, think tanks, academics, and consultancy firms – is highly heteronomous with respect to the EU field of power, namely the field of Eurocracy. Although this space is organised around the valorisation of a particular resource, namely participatory-deliberative formats, its hierarchies, stakes, and forms of recognition are largely dependent upon external institutional logics, rather than being governed by sufficiently autonomous and internally structured principles of evaluation and consecration (independent of the field of power). In other words, there is a degree of self-referentiality among EU democratic innovation reformers, but they are not autonomous from the field of power. It appears that this is not specific to the context of EU promoters or reformers of democratic innovations in national contexts (Ganuza and Ramos Reference Ganuza and Ramos2026).
However, applying field theory rigorously to my empirical findings helps to show that spaces that do not constitute (autonomous) fields may nonetheless help to equip existing fields with new resources (demotic ones in that case). In other words, although the reform space under scrutiny does not generate a distinct form of capital, it does produce specific resources that can be reinvested in attempts to influence the structural dynamics of the Eurocratic field. Mini-publics help actors from diverse institutional backgrounds that invest in this reform space to regain legitimacy within the European field of power by reinforcing the representation of the EU as a fundamentally democratic political entity, against other visions of the EU championed by powerful segments of Eurocracy (EU as intergovernmental; EU as epistocratic/technocratic).
Thus, I have argued that the investment of institutional actors in the reform space can only be understood insofar as this investment is capable of generating returns for these actors within another, more structured space – the field of Eurocracy.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1682098326100666.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Philippe Aldrin, Cyriac Gousset, Vincent Dubois, and Audrey Freyermuth, who encouraged me to write this article and provided valuable feedback on an earlier version during the seminar Revisiting Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociological Work, in the session held on 17 May 2024 at MMSH, Aix-en-Provence (France) entitled Studying Fields of Policies with Bourdieu. I am also grateful to Adrian Bua and Ernesto Ganuza for agreeing to discuss, prior to the submission of this article, the crucial question of the scope and boundaries of field theory.
Financial support
This research did not receive financial support from any institution. It was funded by the author’s own personal resources.
Ethical standards
The interviewees were informed about the nature and conditions of the interviews and provided their consent to participate in this research.
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