Two decades after its institutionalization in the Maastricht Treaty, the citizenship of the Union remains a key topic of the political parlance regarding the democratic future of the EU. Often presented as a powerful indicator for the reconfiguration of the traditional paradigm of citizenship, this instrument of the European integration process has been analyzed mostly from a normative perspective. Hence, while some authors tried to expose its limitations through the conceptual triangle national citizenship-EU citizenship-supranational citizenship, others emphasized its transformative potential as an efficient way to ensure more legitimacy to the decision-making process of the EU.

Unlike these approaches, the present paper seeks to open another paradigm vis-à-vis the EU citizenship, focusing on the exercise of the electoral rights granted to non-national EU citizens in the Maastricht Treaty. First, the paper seeks to compare the institutional aspects and practical arrangements that accompanied the implementation of these electoral entitlements into the legal frameworks of the Member States. Additionally, we try to empirically evaluate the implications of the EU citizenship by paying attention to the unexplored issue of its political practice in the electoral field. Drawing on EP and local elections held from 1999 onward in several Member States, the paper analyzes the virtues and limits of the political model of EU citizenship, trying to assess how the electoral rights associated to this legal status have been implemented and translated into participatory practices in the Member States.