Democratic Participatory Experiments: A Comparison of Democratic Initiatives in South Korea and the EU

By Laure Gillot-Assayag and Hyunkyeong Yun

Indicators from the OECD reveal that fewer than four in ten citizens across member countries trust their national governments, with confidence in politicians ranking among the lowest of public institutions.^[1] Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary), Belgium and South Korea are at the bottom of the world ranking, with a level of trust in both politicians, civil servants, government ministers at its lowest.^[2]

In South Korea, this erosion of institutional trust has coincided with growing public concern that political leadership has become insufficiently responsive to democratic expectations.  The December 2024 constitutional crisis, in which President Yoon Suk-yeol’s brief declaration of martial law triggered mass civic mobilisation and subsequent impeachment proceedings, has reinvigorated calls for permanent deliberative institutions.

This episode has sharpened an ongoing debate: should a permanent citizens’ assembly be understood as a long-term structural reform independent of any particular political crisis, or as a reactive response to the fragility exposed by elite-driven executive power? The distinction matters, as assemblies built primarily as responses to crisis risk to be associated with exceptional politics instead of being embedded in normal democratic routines.^[3] 

Against this backdrop, professors from major Korean universities and policy institutes have begun advocating for a “rewriting of democracy” through redesigned governance architectures.^[4] These discussions reflect a broader effort to restore legitimacy by reconnecting the sovereign citizen with the machinery of the state.

Worldwide, participatory mechanisms have been regarded as tools to promote citizen-oriented governments and complement representative systems to enhance legitimacy, build trust, inclusion, and increase responsiveness from the government. The right to participate appears in the Council of Europe Guidelines on Civil Participation in Political Decision-Making (2017). In France, citizens’ conventions have been used on several topics, most famously the end-of-life issues (2022-2023).

South Korea has also increasingly turned toward a dense ecosystem of participatory mechanisms beyond electoral representation alone — ranging from mandatory local budgeting to national digital petitions and deliberative assemblies. 

Analytical Framework: A Typology of Participatory Mechanisms

A fine-grained typology of participatory mechanisms is applied consistently throughout the paper to avoid treating the participatory landscape as a homogeneous ecosystem. Each is associated with different forms of legitimacy (input, process, output) and different degrees of institutional binding. Four categories structure the subsequent comparative analysis:

a. Co-decision mechanisms, such as participatory budgeting, enable citizens to directly influence or allocate public resources within a redistributive framework. Their legitimacy is primarily output-oriented, and their institutional bindingness is relatively high.

b. Deliberative mini-publics, such as citizens’ assemblies, generate informed and reasoned recommendations. Their legitimacy is procedural and epistemic, and is not derived from decision-making authorities; their outputs are typically advisory and not binding.

c. Aggregative and agenda-setting mechanisms, such as petitions and citizens’ initiatives, allow citizens to express preferences and place issues onto institutional agendas. They typically have low binding force, but can carry significant political weight, depending on scale and visibility.

d. Accountability and grievance-redress mechanisms, such as administrative complaint platforms, are embedded within executive or bureaucratic structures and oriented toward ex post responsiveness by contrast to participatory policy formation.

Part 1 of this brief examines current participatory mechanisms in South Korea and explains how participatory innovations are rooted in a distinctive historical trajectory in which civic mobilisation, legal codification, and digital innovation have converged to embed participation directly into public administration.

Part 2 focuses on EU democratic innovations. The European Union has become a particularly significant laboratory for participatory mechanisms, seeking to address recurring concerns about democratic legitimacy, lack of citizens’ trust towards institutions in a multi-level governance system. This section analyses how the EU has incorporated inclusive forms of citizen input into policymaking processes, as well as the extent to which these mechanisms have influence over decision-making.

Part 3 highlights the lessons each model provides for participatory governance and proposes recommendations to strengthen them.

I. Participatory ecosystem in South Korea

Three broad features define South Korea’s participatory landscape: (1) institutionalized mandatory participatory procedural formats, such as participatory budgeting committees at the local level, (2) targeted engagement platforms for youth and children, and (3) digital or hybrid processes that lower barriers to engagement and diversify input channels.

a. Political, Historical, and Legal Foundations

South Korea’s participatory turn is the product of a long and specific democratic trajectory in which sustained civic pressure translated into institutional change. Yet this trajectory is neither linear nor uncontested: each phase of expansion has generated new tensions around representativeness, political instrumentalization, and highlighted the gap between institutionalization and actual democratic impact.

The Legacy of 1987: A Shift Towards Local Autonomy

The foundations were laid during the 1987 June Democracy Movement (6월 민주화 항쟁), a nationwide mobilization that forced the ruling authoritarian government under General Chun Doo-hwan to concede direct presidential elections and constitutional reform. The movement drew together a remarkably broad coalition: university students, labor unions, religious leaders, opposition politicians, and ordinary middle-class citizens who had largely remained on the political sidelines.^[5]

Civil society organizations that emerged in the movement’s aftermath, including the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice (경실련, founded 1989) and the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (참여연대, founded 1994), would go on to become key institutional actors in shaping participatory governance norms. Yet the democratic transition of 1987 also carried structural limitations that would shape participatory politics for decades.

The constitutional settlement preserved a highly centralized presidential system, and the reintroduction of local elections did not come until 1995 — a full eight years later. This delay reflected elite resistance to meaningful decentralization: local governments were reactivated as arenas for democratic experimentation, but with weak fiscal autonomy and significant dependence on central government transfers.

Participation thus became embedded in everyday governance, but within an administrative framework that circumscribed local governments’ real decision-making power, a tension that continues to affect the depth of participatory mechanisms today in South Korea. 

Legal Codification on Local Participation: From Voluntary to Mandatory

A defining feature of the Korean model is its legal “teeth.” Unlike many countries where participation remains largely consultative, South Korea progressively codified citizen involvement into compulsory statutory frameworks.

The 2011 revision of the Local Finance Act (Article 39)^[6] transformed participatory budgeting from a discretionary option into a mandatory requirement for all 243 local governments: the first national law of its kind globally.^[7] Parallel amendments to the Local Autonomy Act^[8] strengthened the role of resident councils, providing an institutional basis for co-governance at the community level.

This legal codification anchors participatory budgeting firmly in the co-decision category: participatory budget goes beyond consultation and is procedurally linked to formal fiscal outcomes. However, the significance of legal codification should not be overstated. Mandating participation is not the same as guaranteeing meaningful participation.

The available evidence points to a consistent pattern of low and unrepresentative engagement. Kim et al.’s nationwide assessment of PB implementation identifies “low levels of citizen participation” as one of the three central structural failures of the Korean model.^[9] A contributing factor is the absence of explicit equity criteria: unlike the Porto Alegre model, on which Korean PB was nominally based, the Seoul process was designed with no formal mechanisms to prioritise or recruit underrepresented groups.

Without such criteria, self-selection tends to reproduce existing patterns of civic advantage, favouring those with prior organizational ties, time flexibility, and what Lee, Kim & Lee identify as “budget literacy,” the technical familiarity with fiscal processes that deliberation requires.^[10]

The result is a participation profile skewed toward residents already embedded in civic networks, while those with the most direct stake in local fiscal decisions remain on the margins. Granular demographic data on Korean PB participants by income, age, or employment status remains a notable gap in the published research, itself a telling indicator of how little systematic monitoring of representativeness has been built into the process.

The Digital and Deliberative Turn

South Korea’s investment in digital government infrastructure beginning with the national broadband rollout of the 1990s and the e-Government framework of the early 2000s created the technical conditions for large-scale digital participation. The administrations of Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008) and Moon Jae-in (2017-2022) each advanced “government innovation” agendas that positioned digital platforms as instruments of democratic renewal.

The 2016-2017 Candlelight Movement, in which millions of citizens gathered to demand the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, reinforced public expectations that citizens should function as a continuous corrective to elite-driven governance, as opposed to being merely intermittent participants in an electoral process. 

At the local level, participants in deliberative mechanisms tend to be adult residents, neighborhood associations, and community organizations, while youth-specific tracks have engaged students and young professionals through dedicated committees.

At the national level, deliberative processes have drawn on randomly selected citizens alongside civil society organizations, academic experts from institutions such as Seoul National University’s Graduate School of Public Administration, and policy research bodies including the Korea Development Institute (KDI).

However, the expansion of digital participation has also exposed structural inequalities in who is actually able to engage. Research tracking Korean e-government use from 2012 to 2021 found that while overall e-government usage increased steadily, e-participation services such as the e-People platform diffused far more slowly and maintained significantly lower usage rates than transactional services.^[11] 

Critically, the digital divide in Korea operates not primarily along lines of internet access and digital government^[12](where South Korea ranks among global leaders) but along lines of digital literacy and effective use: elderly citizens, those on low incomes or low education levels, and residents of rural areas face compounding barriers that limit their ability to access civic participation platforms.^[13]

South Korea has the highest old-age poverty rate in the OECD with over 40% of those aged 65 or older falling below half the median income^[14], making the digital-first design of many participatory mechanisms a de facto exclusion mechanism for a substantial segment of the population.

Taken together, South Korea’s participatory governance architecture reflects the convergence of democratic transition, legal decentralization, digital innovation, and sustained civic mobilization. Participation is not merely a governance tool, but a democratic right institutionalized to strengthen accountability and adapt public decision-making to the expectations of an engaged society. Yet the distance between institutionalization and substantive democratic outcomes remains important. Legal mandates have not automatically produced inclusive, well-resourced, or politically insulated processes. The challenge for South Korea’s next phase of participatory reform is not primarily to invent new mechanisms, but to ensure that existing ones substantially deliver the democratic promise their legal architecture implies.

b.     Recent Participatory Democracy Innovations in South Korea

The Korean model is based on the functional difference between two layers. At the local level, participation is largely administrative and fiscal; it is anchored in hard law (the Local Finance Act) to ensure transparency in how taxes are spent and to solve immediate community issues. In contrast, at the national level, participation functions as a political and deliberative safety valve. National mechanisms, such as digital petitions and citizens’ assemblies, can be deployed to address problems or political crises where the parliamentary system faces gridlock.  Local participation provides the structural durability of the system and national participation provides the dynamic flexibility to navigate shifts in the mandate.

Participatory Budgeting: A Co-decision Mechanism

In typological terms, participatory budgeting (PB) is South Korea’s most institutionally embedded co-decision mechanism. It operates through a direct procedural link between citizen input and formal fiscal outcomes, with a relatively high degree of institutional bindingness compared to consultative or agenda-setting instruments.

Across multiple cities, local governments have actively invited citizen proposals for budgetary allocations. In 2021, the sum of 10 billion Korean won (KRW) was used for the first time in Seoul to turn citizens’ proposals into real projects, through the platform “Democracy Seoul”.^[15] Residents — including those who live, work, or are tied to organizations in the city — are eligible to participate, highlighting broad inclusivity in eligibility criteria. Similarly, Guri City launched a call for Resident Participatory Budget Projects in 2025, allocating 200 million KRW directly for citizen-initiated projects and 800 million KRW for local self-governance planning. Proposals undergo departmental review and deliberation by a participatory budgeting committee, before being adopted into the draft budget, illustrating a procedure aimed at linking citizen input to formal fiscal outcomes.^[16]

Other municipalities have generational or thematic emphasis, like Nowon-gu in Seoul and its Youth Participatory Budgeting Contest^[17], encouraging young residents to propose projects across categories such as local revitalization, entrepreneurship and climate responsiveness, supported by expert evaluations and public criteria.

The variety of cities and districts involved sheds light on cross-regional diffusion of participatory governance models, each adapting the core mechanism to local priorities and capacities. However, because the Local Finance Act does not prescribe a precise definition of participatory budgeting, it allows each locality to design its own procedures. Hence implementation has been highly uneven, with some jurisdictions operating robust deliberative processes and others fulfilling the legal requirement in name only.

This gap has become more visible in recent years. Data from the Open Government Partnership’s assessment of Korea’s 2021-2023 Action Plan reveals that participatory budgets were actually reduced in 9 of Korea’s 17 provinces and special administrative divisions during the implementation period. Several major city administrations including Seoul, Busan, Incheon, Daejeon, and Ulsan justified these cuts by arguing that participatory budget-funded projects had been “captured by special interests” and were no longer representative of the majority of local residents.

This backlash highlights a tension inherent to co-decision mechanisms: when institutionalised participation is perceived as dominated by organized civil groups rather than the general public, the output legitimacy that justifies the mechanism is called into question. At the national level, the participatory budgeting allocation started at 0.01% of the overall national budget in 2018 and had shrunk to 0.002% by 2024 — a trajectory pointing to de-prioritization rather than institutional consolidation, and a weakening of co-decision at the highest level of governance.

“K-Assemblies”

In parallel, there is a recent growing momentum to make citizens’ assemblies a permanent part of the democratic system in South Korea.^[18]

In August 2025, the National Assembly held a forum on the “Citizens’ Assembly Act” to create a permanent citizens’ assembly. Advocates argue that such assemblies allow citizens to directly voice opinions on key issues, helping address public distrust in politicians and complementing the party-centered political system.^[19]

“Through a citizens’ assembly based on the principles of deliberative democracy, citizens directly voice their opinions on major issues, and the National Assembly and executive branch can formally review and respond to its recommendations. This can serve as an antidote to the public’s distrust in politicians,” explains Kim Joo-hyung, Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Seoul National University (SNU).^[20]

The 2024 Climate Youth Council or the Children’s Assembly offers opportunities for young people and children^[21] to discuss environmental policies and find solutions through dialogue and compromise. Each electoral district has a children’s assembly research group (CARG) that sends one child MP (usually around 12 years old) to the Children’s Assembly. Some proposals have become laws, such as the “installation of small toilets for children,” asking for five or more toilet bowls in public restrooms.^[22]

Petitions

South Korea’s petition mechanisms are best understood as aggregative and agenda-setting instruments. They enable citizens to place issues onto institutional agendas and signal the scale of public concern, but they do not carry binding force and their democratic legitimacy rests primarily on popular voice rather than deliberative quality.

The National Petition to the Blue House (국민청원) was an online platform where  citizens’ petitions that gained 200,000 or more supporting recommendations within a period of 30 days received an official response from government officials, with petitions covering human rights, gender equality, safety and the environment, being the most likely to reach the signature threshold.^[23] It lasted from 2019-2022 and was discontinued due to the end of the Moon Jae-In administration and widespread criticism over excessive expressions and inappropriate user logins.

While high-profile petition systems can generate rapid agenda movement, they also carry a risk: visibility and popularity may outweigh deliberative quality or long-term policy coherence. This contrasts with deliberative mini-publics, where the legitimacy logic is inverted — small, informed groups trading breadth of signal for depth of reasoning. Both functions are democratically valuable but should not be conflated.

e-People: An Accountability Mechanism

e-People is a digital platform that allows citizens to provide suggestions for improving government policies, administrative systems and their operations. Its main role is to allow public to report problems, request explanations, or urge corrective actions by administrative agencies.^[24]

e-People operates as an accountability and grievance-redress mechanism, distinct in function from the co-decision, deliberative and agenda-setting instruments described above. Based on ex post reporting, it does not enable prospective policy formation. E-people is akin to an ombudsman platform rather than a participatory governance tool in the strict sense, embedded within executive structures and oriented toward administrative responsiveness.

All these mechanisms represent different dimensions of participatory democracy – decision-making, deliberation, voice, and accountability – and each address a distinct democratic deficit, contributing in a complementary way to the legitimacy of the political system.

II. Democratic Innovations in the EU institutions

The EU’s participatory architecture – ranging from Citizens’ Panels to petitions and EU Citizens’ Initiative – represents one of the most extensive and experimental ecosystems of transnational democratic innovation in the world. Even though there exists no permanent citizens’ participatory mechanism in the EU^[25], the European Commission’s Defence of Democracy package (2023) reflects a major shift toward more structured participatory infrastructure beyond ad hocconsultations. It fostered a broad public consultation via a “call for evidence” (16 February-14 April 2023), which received over 1,200 contributions, mainly from EU citizens, alongside inputs from NGOs, public authorities, businesses, and other stakeholders. The consultation was operated through an open online submission process, allowing direct feedback on the initiative.

a. The First Mechanisms of Participatory Democracy in the EU

Since the 1990s^[26] , EU democratic innovations have developed and signal a clear normative ambition: to complement representative democracy with plural forms of citizen engagement in response to long-standing concerns about the EU’s “democratic deficit” and recurring criticisms against a remote and technocratic bureaucracy.

Citizen’s Consultations

The European Citizens’ Consultations (2006-2007) were a series of citizens’ consultations in town-hall style meetings across Member states, organised by independent and non-profit organizations and co-financed by the EU commission. Participants were selected randomly by professional recruitment agencies or universities at the national level to ensure demographic representativeness. The process followed three main stages: an initial EU-level agenda-setting event where citizens identified and voted electronically on three priority themes; national deliberations in each Member state, combining information phases with facilitated workshops; and a final transnational synthesis phase in which citizen representatives aggregated the results into a common report submitted to EU institutions. Participants prioritized by electronic vote three key policy areas for the future of Europe: energy and environment, social welfare, and the EU’s global role and immigration.

The format was relatively open-ended: citizens asked questions, voiced concerns, and interacted directly with EU representatives. The underlying logic was mostly top-down transparency and proximity-building – making the EU more “visible,” explaining policies, and collecting general feedback. There was no structured methodology for aggregating input, and no explicit mandate to feed results into a specific policy process.

Citizens’ Consultations were primarily designed as a communication and outreach instrument, as reflected in the involvement of DG Communication. In that sense, citizen’s dialogues functioned as political dialogue events and legitimacy-building exercises.

Citizens’ Dialogues

European Citizens’ Dialogues (2012-2021) were designed to provide a pan-European deliberative process with a clearer policy purpose than Citizens’ Consultations. They took place across multiple Member States, sometimes in online formats, with the participation of European Commissioners as well as Members of the European Parliament and national, regional, and local political representatives. Citizens’ Dialogues followed a methodology that included facilitated discussions, question-and-answers sessions, and the synthesis of participants’ inputs. Importantly, they were explicitly linked to the European Council’s strategic reflection on the future of Europe, meaning their outputs were intended to inform high-level decision-making and political priorities. This mechanism contributed to move closer to a deliberative input mechanism feeding into agenda-setting at the EU strategic level, with pilot panels on topics such as biodiversity, youth employment and digitalization.

The Conferences on the future of Europe (2021-2022) combined randomly selected citizen panels, institutional stakeholders, and a multilingual digital platform, aiming to institutionalize citizen input into long-term strategic reflection on the Union’s future.^[27]  The conferences also established a more explicit expectation of policy follow-up, with structured reporting and formal engagement by EU institutions, particularly the Commission, on the resulting proposals. In this sense, it marked a shift from largely symbolic or ad hoc participatory exercises toward a more institutionalised, multi-channel model of citizen input linked, at least partially, to agenda-setting and policy development within the EU.

b. Current participatory mechanisms at the level of EU institutions

Petitions

Like South Korea’s Blue House petition mechanism, the EU petition system is an aggregative and agenda-setting instrument.

The main formal petition mechanism at EU level is grounded in Article 227 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). It is the oldest participatory democracy instrument established by the Maastricht Treaty (1992). It allows any EU citizen or resident to submit a complaint or request on matters falling within the Union’s fields of activity. Petitions are examined by the Committee on Petitions (PETI), which can decide to keep them open, refer them to the Commission, request further information, or in some cases initiate follow-up actions such as hearings or fact-finding missions. In practice, the mechanism is designed to empower citizens and trigger parliamentary discussion, with effects that are predominantly agenda-setting rather than binding.

European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI)

The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) has been introduced by the Lisbon Treaty (2007) and operational since 2012. It grants one million citizens from at least one quarter of member states to formally request that the European Commission propose legislation. Whereas petitions are reactive and open-ended complaints, the ECI is agenda-setting: unlike petitions that are reactive and open-ended complaints, it requires a high threshold (one million citizens across multiple member states) and can trigger a formal request for legislative action from the Commission.

The ECI stands as one of the EU’s most ambitious transnational participatory instruments, yet its effectiveness is curtailed by the Commission’s discretion over follow-up, limiting both its binding force and its democratic impact.

European Citizens’ Panels

European Citizens’ Panels are a recurring EU participatory mechanism that brings together around 150 randomly selected citizens from all 27 Member States to deliberate on key forthcoming EU policy initiatives. Participants are recruited through stratified random selection designed to reflect the EU’s socio-demographic diversity, including quotas for gender balance and a significant proportion of young people (around one-third aged 16-29), with additional criteria such as geography, education, and socio-economic background. The panels operate through a structured deliberative process across several sessions: an initial phase of idea generation, a second phase of refinement and peer review to develop draft recommendations, and a final session where citizens agree on collective recommendations that are formally submitted to the European Commission. Work takes place in small groups and plenary settings, supported by facilitators, ensuring iterative discussion and synthesis. Recent citizens’ panels (2026) have focused on topics, such as energy efficiency and the new European Budget.

Complaints: ex-post participation

Since the 1990s, EU citizens have had access to ex post participatory mechanisms allowing them to challenge or report problems in the application of EU law. One channel is the right to submit complaints to the European Ombudsman who investigates cases of maladministration within EU institutions under the Treaties, granted Articles 20, 24, 228 of TFEU. Complaints must generally be filed within two years and after prior contact with the institution concerned, although the Ombudsman can also initiate inquiries independently.

A second avenue is the possibility to lodge complaints with the European Commission when Member States are suspected of breaching EU law (Article 17 of the Treaty on European Union, TEU). The Commission can examine alleged violations and initiate infringement procedures if necessary. These mechanisms are particularly relevant in areas where EU legislation exists but is unevenly implemented, like environmental protection, transport safety, or public health regulation.

These initiatives are complemented by public consultations, stakeholder dialogues, and other digital engagement mechanisms, supported by a rich network of EU participatory organizations, consultative networks and NGOs to foster EU governance (the European Partnership for Democracy, Democratic Society, Federation for Innovation in Democracy, Mission publique, ect.) collectively gathering data, training and enabling citizens to influence EU policymaking at different levels.

Digital participation

Alongside recent institutional innovations, the EU has increasingly digitized its participatory infrastructure in order to make consultation more coherent, accessible, and scalable. This shift is reflected in the redesign of the “Have Your Say” portal, which now functions as a central online entry point for citizens to access consultations and provide feedback across Commission initiatives.

It is complemented by the Citizens’ Engagement Platform, which enables more continuous and open-ended digital participation beyond formal consultation windows, including the submission of ideas and thematic contributions from youth citizens assemblies.

These tools are supported by the new “Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy,” which provides technical and methodological expertise through a Community of Practice and trainings for local, regional and national public administrations.

These recent initiatives reflect a move toward a more integrated digital ecosystem for participation, linking consultation, deliberation, and feedback within a unified online architecture.

III. Similarities and Differences between South Korean and EU participatory democracy mechanisms

a. Strengths and weaknesses

A comparative look at participatory mechanisms in South Korea and the EU reveal similarities and contrasts. Both systems combine deliberative, consultative, and digital forms of participatory participation, reflecting a broader global shift toward multi-channel dialogue between citizens and institutions. Citizens’ assemblies, public consultations, petitions, and digital platforms are present in both contexts, and they are similarly justified in terms of improving democratic legitimacy through enhanced inclusion and responsiveness.

In the European Union, participatory mechanisms reflect a strong commitment to pluralism, procedural diversity and institutional creativity. The main strength of the EU model lies in its institutional experimentation and normative ambition: it seeks to accommodate participation across 27 member states and multiple institutional layers. The EU has not relied on a single model of participation, but has experimented with multiple formats: open dialogue events (Citizens’ Dialogues), agenda-setting instruments (ECI), structured consultations (ECCs), and deliberative mini-publics (CoFoE and Citizens’ Panels). This diversity allows different democratic functions to be partially covered – expression, consultation, deliberation, and agenda-setting. This produces a rich ecosystem of democratic innovations in multilingual formats.

The EU institutions also draw on in-house expertise within the Directorates-General and Heads of Units at the Commission, as well as external expertise in science for policy, and provide funding through Horizon Europe grants to develop networks that connect academics and experts in order to enhance the scalability of participation (e.g. Scaledem at Missions Publiques^[28]).

The most fundamental weakness is what can be described as a “fragmentation problem^[29]”. There is no unified framework that clearly defines the purpose, hierarchy, and expected impact of each instrument. Citizens are often unable to understand which instrument is appropriate for which type of input.

A second limitation concerns the lack of knowledge, unequal participation and representativeness. Despite the formal openness of these mechanisms, participation tends to be skewed toward highly educated, politically engaged, and often pro-European citizens, and this is an accessibility and perceived legitimacy problem. This is partly due to a nominal problem, as participatory mechanisms are often labelled under different terms (“dialogues,” “consultations,” “panels,” etc.), frequently rebranded over time. This lack of stable terminology makes it difficult for citizens to understand the purpose, scope, and expected input of each mechanism.

A third issue is the weakness of the feedback loop between citizens and policymaking. Across most instruments, citizens remain insufficiently informed about what happens to their input.

Notably, the EU has no equivalent to Korea’s hard-law mandatory participatory budgeting obligation. EU participation remains predominantly in the consultative, deliberative, and agenda-setting registers: high in procedural ambition, but without the output-legitimacy anchoring that South Korea’s local fiscal participation mechanisms provide.

The main strength of the South Korean model lies in its speed and digital integration, which create a strong perception that citizen input can generate immediate institutional reaction. South Korea’s participatory system is nationally contained: compared to the EU, South Korea’s participatory budgeting initiatives have more direct procedural links to concrete budgetary outcomes, particularly at the municipal level where citizen proposals are integrated into official draft budgets and deliberated in local committees. However, high-profile petition systems can create volatility in agenda-setting, where visibility and popularity may outweigh deliberative quality or long-term policy coherence. Citizen input at the national level remains very limited, as well as the local level for policies beyond the fiscal domain.

At the same time, these systems should not be understood as opposites. Both cases illustrate a hybridisation of participatory democracy, in which deliberative, consultative, and administrative mechanisms coexist and partially overlap. Rather than converging on a single model, the EU and South Korea demonstrate different institutional frameworks for combining participation with governance, shaped by their respective political structures, administrative traditions, and conceptions of state–citizen relations.

b. Recommendations for Possible Future Pathways

Participatory democracy boosts citizen engagement but faces criticism for limited representativeness, lack of expertise, advisory-only outcomes, potential manipulation, and slower decision-making.

An important cross-cutting lesson is that the four participatory types have different reform priorities. Co-decision mechanisms like participatory budgeting require sustained fiscal resourcing and protection from political reversal. Deliberative mini-publics require stronger links to formal decision-making and institutionalised insulation. Agenda-setting mechanisms require better design to prevent capture by organised groups and increase accessibility. Accountability mechanisms require investment in digital inclusion to prevent their benefits from accruing only to digitally literate citizens.

First, the EU would benefit from a unified strategic framework for participation, ensuring coherence across instruments and clearer purposes. This could include standardised feedback mechanisms, so that citizens can trace how their input shapes policy outcomes. Embedding participation more systematically into the legislative cycle would enhance its relevance and credibility. Certain participatory mechanisms could, for instance, become mandatory advisory steps for selected legislative proposals. Stabilizing the terminology, instead of rebranding participatory mechanisms under different labels at different intervals, would also improve their visibility, coherence, and overall intelligibility for the general public.

To improve participatory processes, the ECI could become more user-friendly and more widely shared among the member states’ population, provide feedback and access to results, thereby strengthening ‘e-democracy.’ Targeted digital outreach (including social media ecosystems) could significantly broaden participation beyond highly mobilised groups. This would also enable hybrid formats combining in-person and online deliberation, lowering barriers to entry and fostering larger cross-border participation.

By contrast, South Korea has developed highly digitized participatory platforms that fosters more direct engagement, enabling petitions to more quickly influence policy decisions and illustrating a more interactive model of digital civic participation. However, a remaining challenge is to ensure sufficient transparent public reporting and that assemblies remain free from political interference and continue as procedural mechanisms under different administrations. A key issue for a permanent citizens’ assembly is both to represent all segments of society, remain accessible to those less politically engaged, and maintain transparency through comprehensive public reporting.

South Korea’s new participatory processes may draw valuable lessons and insights from leading countries in the field of participatory experiments, like Belgium^[30], but it is equally important to develop a model that reflects Korea’s distinctive political culture. South Korea’s participatory assemblies could also benefit from the linkage with existing national lifelong education initiatives as set forth in Article 19 of the Lifelong Education Act^[31] to provide participants with clear information on policies and make informed decisions.

A lesson from this comparison is that effective participatory democracy requires both institutional embedding and responsiveness: the EU may benefit from stronger feedback and digital integration, while South Korea could strengthen deliberative pluralism and institutional insulation from short-term public pressure, through the constitution of mini-publics, a permanent citizens’ assembly, combined with ad hoc consultations.

Conclusion

Participatory initiatives in South Korea and the EU illustrate a shared democratic commitment to enriching representative systems through institutional reform. They highlight an important normative and paradigm shift toward inclusive, citizen-centric governance in the 21st century. This brief has shown that the distance between institutional design and substantive democratic impact remains a challenge for both democratic models.

South Korea’s experience is instructive because it has gone further than most in codifying participation into hard law. Mandatory participatory budgeting, national deliberative assemblies, and large-scale digital petitions represent a dense institutional architecture built over civic pressure and democratic reform. And yet, legal mandates have not automatically produced inclusive, well-resourced, or politically insulated processes.

EU instruments benefit from a relatively lower risk of political capture because they operate through multi-level administrative filtering involving several EU institutions. This layered architecture disperses decision-making authority, making it harder for a single government, party, or organised interest group to dominate or appropriate the process.

Mapping both systems onto the same typological framework clarifies that their limitations are not identical: Korea’s principal challenge is protecting existing co-decision mechanisms from fiscal retrenchment and political capture and deepening the deliberative quality of its assembly model.

The EU’s principal challenge is reducing fragmentation across its diverse participatory instrument portfolio, enhancing citizens’ understanding and visibility of these mechanisms, and strengthening feedback loops between citizen input and legislative action, particularly in the deliberative and agenda-setting registers where it is most active.

The democratic priority for both lies in sustained investment in visibility and accessibility, as well as strong safeguards against administrative or political capture.

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Footnotes

^[1] OECD (2024), OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions – 2024 Results: Building Trust in a Complex Policy Environment, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9a20554b-en.

^[2]  KEY Economics Outlook, Korea Europe & You, December 19, 2025. Available at: https://www.key-society.com/post/economics-outlook

^[3] Leem, K. H., Chong, E., Han, J., Jhee, B. K., Kim, J., Lee, J., Lee, S. S., Lee, S. W., Song, J., & Yoon, K. I. (2025). South Korean Democracy: Back to the Brink. Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, 13(1), 127-150. https://doi.org/10.18588/202505.00a588  

^[4] Democracy Cluster, Institute for Future Strategy, Seoul National University. Available at:  https://ifs.snu.ac.kr/en/cluster/democracy;SDF2022, “Rewriting Democracy.” Available at: https://www.sdf.or.kr/2022/en/about

^[5] Cho, J. E, Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea’s Democracy, University of Michigan Press, 2024.

^[6] Local Finance Act, https://elaw.klri.re.kr/eng_mobile/viewer.do?hseq=55630&type=sogan&key=15  

^[7] Kim, S. (Ed.) (2016). Participatory Governance and Policy Diffusion in Local Governments in Korea: Implementation of Participatory Budgeting, KDI Research Monograph, No. 2016-01, Korea Development Institute (KDI), Sejong, https://doi.org/10.22740/kdi.rm.e.2016.01

^[8]Local Autonomy Act, July 26, 2017 (Act No. 14839). Korea Legislation Research Institute.https://elaw.klri.re.kr/eng_service/lawView.do?hseq=44511&lang=ENG

^[9]  Kim, S. (Ed.) (2016). Participatory Governance and Policy Diffusion in Local Governments in Korea: Implementation of Participatory Budgeting, KDI Research Monograph, No. 2016-01, Korea Development Institute (KDI), Sejong, https://doi.org/10.22740/kdi.rm.e.2016.01

^[10] Lee, J., Kim, S., & Lee, J. (2022). Public vs. Public: Balancing the Competing Public Values of Participatory Budgeting. Public Administration Quarterly, 46(1), 39-66.

^[11] Shin, G.-W, Moon, R.-J. (2017). “South Korea after Impeachment.” Journal of Democracy 28(4): 117-131.

^[12] OECD (2025), Digital Government Review of Korea: Harnessing Digital and Data to Transform Government, OECD Digital Government Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9defc197-en.

^[13] Choi Jeong-yoon, “7 in 10 Korean adults digitally adept, but divide widens by income, education”, The Korea Herald,  19 August 2025. Available at: https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10556986

^[14] OECD (2025), Pensions at a Glance 2025: OECD and G20 Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/e40274c1-en.

^[15] Seoul Metropolitan Government, “Seoul allocates KRW 70 bil for ‘Participatory Budgeting’, investing KRW 10 bil in the online platform ‘Democracy Seoul’. January 2, 2021. Available at:  https://english.seoul.go.kr/seoul-allocates-krw-70-bil-for-participatory-budgeting-investing-krw-10-bil-in-the-online-platform-democracy-seoul/

^[16] The Asia Business Daily, “Guri city invites proposals for 2025 Participatory Budget Projects,” 22 April 2025, Lee Jonggu. Available at:  https://cm.asiae.co.kr/en/article/2025042214203145959

^[17] The Asia Business Daily, “Guri city invites proposals for 2025 Participatory Budget Projects,” 22 April 2025, Lee Jonggu. Available at: https://cm.asiae.co.kr/en/article/2025042214203145959

^[18] For a general overview of the benefits and challenges of citizens’ assemblies, see Reuchamps, M., Vrydagh, J., Welp, Y, De Gruyter Handbook of Citizen’s Assemblies, De Gruyter, 2023.

^[19] Hankyoreh, “Europe looks to citizens’ assemblies to help tackle contentious issues”, 9 October 2025. Available at: https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/1222501.html

^[20] Quoted in Hankyoreh, “Europe looks to citizens’ assemblies to help tackle contentious issues”, 9 October 2025. Available at: https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/1222501.html

^[21] Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Seoul, “Climate youth council 2024 (Part 2): A political participation project by students based on the climate citizens’ assembly”, Kangjun Lee, 5 March 2025. Available at: https://kr.boell.org/en/2025/03/05/2024-gihucheongnyeonuihoe-minjujuuileul-ganghwahago-gihubyeonhwae-majseo-ssauneun

^[22] Inter-parliamentary union. “Children’s assembly in the Republic of Korea”, 4 July 2023. Available at: https://www.ipu.org/news/case-studies/2023-07/childrens-assembly-in-republic-korea

^[23] Kim, K. & Suh, C. (2024). Mobilizing grievances in the internet age: The case of national online petitioning in South Korea, 2017-2022. PloS one, 19(5). https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0302373

^[24] E-people, Anti-corruption & Civils Rights Commission. Available at: https://www.epeople.go.kr/petition/htp/htp.npaid

^[25] DG for internal policies (September 2022), Study requested by the AFCO Committee, “Towards a permanent citizens’ participatory mechanism in the EU”, Alberto Alemanno, available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2022/735927/IPOL_STU(2022)735927_EN.pdf

^[26] DG for internal policies (September 2022), Study requested by the AFCO Committee, “Towards a permanent citizens’ participatory mechanism in the EU”, Alberto Alemanno, p. 10-13. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2022/735927/IPOL_STU(2022)735927_EN.pdf

^[27] Randomly selected 150 citizens from all member states discuss policy themes and submit recommendations for the European Commission. See European Commission, “European Citizens’ Panels.’ Available at: https://citizens.ec.europa.eu/european-citizens-panels_en

^[28] Missions publiques, “Scaledem: Mettre à l’échelle les innovations démocratiques”, available at: https://missionspubliques.org/pf/scaledem-mettre-a-lechelle-les-innovations-democratiques/

^[29] Dominik Hierlemann, Stefan Roch, Paul Butcher, Janis A. Emmanouilidis, Corina Stratulat, Marteen de Groot, Under construction, citizen participation in the European Union, Verlag, Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2022, p. 44.

^[30] Citizens’ Assemblies in Belgium and Korea: Reflections and Prospects, Symposium at Seoul National Univerdity, Democracy Cluster. https://ifs.snu.ac.kr/en/event?mode=view&eventidx=115

^[31] National Institute for Lifelong Education, South Korea. https://www.nile.or.kr/index.do?lang=en

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About the Authors

Laure Gillot-Assayag

Laure Gillot-Assayag is a Ph.D. candidate in Political studies at EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris, France. She is currently a consultant for UNESCO, focusing on higher education policies. Laure graduated in International and European Law and History from École Normale Supérieure and Sciences Po Paris. Previously, she served as a Legislative Fellow in the U.S. Congress (D.C.), as a Policy analyst at the European Parliament, as a law expert for the Venice Commission in the Council of Europe. She also worked for the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. Lecturer at Sciences Po, former Fulbright fellow at U.C. Berkeley, her research on public policy and political theory has been published in the Revue française de science politique, Esprit, and La Vie des Idées. She holds a university diploma in Korean studies and was a visiting researcher at Yonsei University (South Korea). 

Hyunkyeong Yun

Hyunkyeong Yun is a Junior Policy Analyst at the OECD’s Science, Technology and Innovation directorate (STI/STP), where she works at the intersection of research governance, digital policy, and international cooperation. She has contributed to flagship OECD publications including the STI Outlook 2025 and the Digital Education Outlook 2023, and led analytical work on the Egypt Innovation Review Report 2026. Hyunkyeong holds a Master of International Governance and Diplomacy from Sciences Po Paris and is fluent in English, Korean, and French.