The question of political participation beyond elections is a recurrent subject in contemporary political life. Since the beginning of the 1990s, official European Union documents stress the participation of a so-called ‘organised civil society' , thought to lead to increased democratization of the national and international sphere.
The paper starts from the assumption that this discourse has an effect on ‘civil society actors' and goes on to study the tools developed to analyze these effects, called institutionalization, bureaucratization or professionalization of the organized civil society. The political party and social movement literature has identified these changes empirically and theoretically already at the beginning of the twentieth century. The aim of this paper is to analyze these approaches and to draw lessons for the study of the transformation of civil society organizations' structures in the EU.