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Moreover, the use of the new possibilities created by technology has opened new perspectives to the political participation of the citizens, allowing investing inputs into the political system (Gil de Zúñiga, Huber and Strauß, 2018), namely using social networks (Marcos García, Alonso Muñoz and Casero-Ripollés, 2017). However, the focus of the present work lies in ECI.

There are new technological tools that create a new space of citizenship with great political potential (Chadwick, 2017), but it is still not safe to affirm its success towards a legitimate and informed individual exercise (Aguilera and Casero Ripollés, 2018).

Lisbon Treaty introduced the right to the ECI. It allows EU citizens of at least seven Member States to invite the European Commission to submit legislative proposals in areas of European Union competence as conditions of legal admissibility. The aim is to actively involve citizens in the European decision-making, giving them an indirect form of legislative initiative. To date, more than 9 million of European citizens have signed a European citizenship initiative.

It is after registration that a process of collection of support of the proposal is initiated by its organisers, by one million of citizens from at least one quarter of the EU Member States. It is an invitation to the Commission to submit legislative proposals. Up to now, with four very different situations, which fulfilled the full requirements, there was still no fully successful initiative to give rise to a concrete legislative proposal. However, it is an instrument of future and of great democratic significance to consider, as pointed out by the methodology of documentary and legislative critical analysis followed. The ECI is fully operational, but it is possible to assess its use and improve it, and the revision and simplification of this instrument is ongoing, in order to make it more user-friendly and accessible to citizens.

Information technologies (IT) are the essence of up-to-date organizations in general, and changes in this field are occurring at an uncontrollable pace, interrupting traditional models and forcing organizations to implement new models, new ways of working and communicating (Schuelke-Leech, 2018). In this context, the EC, not ignoring the relevance and transformations inherent in the use of IT, where is included the internet with all its potential, namely information access, communication and work collaboration (Murray, 2016), has included its use in several areas. An example of this is the platform, developed and put at the service of citizens, which centrally enables citizens to be easily and efficiently involved in the policies that affect their lives, including petitions promoted by the EC itself or any citizen / organization belonging to the EC. This results in a democratization of the instrument to the extent that citizen participation becomes easier and friendly.

The integration of technologies in order to stimulate the active participation of citizens requires their perception of the technological means and initiatives supported by on-line platforms placed at their disposal. In this context, the research questions to be answered are: “Are citizens in the context of the “European citizens” initiative, (1) using the platform for new petitions? and (2) has its use increased over time?” These questions are justified by the non-existence reported in the literature of similar research papers.

In this context, our research uses the Case study methodology (Yin, 2009) in order to allow an exploration and understanding of how much the platform is used in petitions and the evolution of this same usage from since its first use by organizations and citizens until the present.