The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) has the potential to significantly change the dynamics of interaction between EU institutions and civil society, which we conceive as a field. This article analyzes how the EU civil society field has been re‐shaped by the ECI, the creation of networks and relationships between EU and national organizations and the effects of politicization. Using interview data and online documents from five ECI cases, we argue that an ECI can potentially transform the meta‐field of civil society and democracy by altering what is at stake. We show that the five cases compete in a single field of civil society in the EU where incumbent organizations react to challenges. However, the field cannot be characterized in terms of a competition between insiders and outsiders. Rather, the ECI favours actors able to combine activism in different spheres – which we call multi‐positional actors.

El referéndum del Brexit es un buen ejemplo de la especial vulnerabilidad del proyecto europeo ante la desinformación. Por ello las instituciones han desarrollado una serie de iniciativas durante 2018 para definir una estrategia europea contra la desinformación que enfatiza la responsabilidad de las redes sociales en la denuncia de los contenidos falsos. Además, ante la debilidad de la esfera pública europea, las instituciones europeas apoyan la creación de redes europeas de fact checkers. Esta estrategia implica la denuncia de las mentiras en lugar de una de creación de marcos alternativos, lo que autores como Lakoff (2004) consideran un error desde la perspectiva del framing. Empíricamente demostramos mediante un análisis de las principales redes de actores en este asunto (académicos, fundaciones, think tanks, medios, plataformas de redes sociales y fact checkers) que existe una disputa para definir la mejor forma de combatir la desinformación a escala europea.

Although never conceived as a tool of direct democracy, the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) raised hopes that it would involve citizens more directly in EU decision making. Previous research has suggested that one contribution of the ECI is its effect on fostering public deliberation on EU issues, raising questions about the ECI's potential as a tool for social movements to generate communicative power in relation to EU issues. This article draws on agonistic and deliberative perspectives to argue that communicative power generation can be seen as a process where ECI organizers use social media to advance specific understandings of their concerns and channel those understandings into mainstream mass media. The article analyses this by investigating how frames constructed on the Stop TTIP campaign's Facebook page have resonated in twelve online news sites in four European countries in the wake of the Greenpeace leaks.

The negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) saw the development of a transnational campaign that gained momentum as the negotiations reached a critical status, including in Spain. The Spanish anti-TTIP campaign is interesting in that it has gained some salience among media, civil society, trade unions and some political parties in a country where trade and EU affairs are rarely controversial. In order to explain the transformation of the attitudes of Spanish civil society vis-à-vis the EU in the case of TTIP, we formulated descriptive and explanatory research questions, respectively: how is the mobilisation against TTIP different from the traditional involvement of Spanish civil society actors in EU issues? Why have actors which did not work together in previous campaigns cooperated in the case of TTIP? We analyse the Spanish anti-TTIP campaign, and we argue that the change of positions of Spanish civil society actors in relation to the EU in the case of TTIP can be explained on the basis of a change in the field, a notion that is suggestive because of the degree of continuity in the identity of the entrepreneurs of the anti-TTIP campaign in relation to past EU-critical mobilisations. Rather than an increased political cost of EU decision-making at national level, we argue that the introduction of EU-critical ideas can lead to an 'empowering dissensus' where the ability to mobilise citizens on EU issues acquires a renewed importance. We tackle our puzzle through a combination of methods, using semi-structured interviews and network analysis.

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology addresses contemporary themes in the field of Political Sociology. Over recent years, attention has turned increasingly to processes of Europeanization and globalization and the social and political spaces that are opened by them. These processes comprise both institutional-constitutional change and new dynamics of social transnationalism. Europeanization and globalization are also about changing power relations as they affect people's lives, social networks and forms of mobility.The Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology series addresses linkages between regulation, institution building and the full range of societal repercussions at local, regional, national, European and global level, and will sharpen understanding of changing patterns of attitudes and behaviours of individuals and groups, the political use of new rights and opportunities by citizens, new conflict lines and coalitions, societal interactions and networking, and shifting loyalties and solidarity within and across the European space.We welcome proposals from across the spectrum of Political Sociology and Political Science, on dimensions of citizenship; political attitudes and values; political communication and public spheres; states, communities, governance structure and political institutions; forms of political participation; populism and the radical right; and democracy and democratization.