Taking citizens’ ideas and discourse seriously: a non-elite take on discursive institutionalism

Abstract The amplification of citizen voice in democratic processes poses new challenges for policymakers and highlights the need of academic work to refocus attention on ordinary citizens in political discourse, including in notoriously elite-driven policy areas. We propose a non-elite take on Discursive Institutionalism and apply its baseline ambition to take “ideas and discourse seriously” systematically to the context of EU foreign-policy decision-making in two fundamentally different institutional contexts: the Republic of Cyprus as a simple polity and the Republic of Ireland as a tendentially compound one. We show that unlike what empirical applications to date suggest, the approach not only lends itself to such a bottom-up application; our research design maximises its original analytical ambitions by revealing how institutional design shapes citizen influence and thereby answers to a normative imperative that neither academics nor political leaders can afford to ignore.