The European Citizens’ Initiative is designed to make European democracy more directby allowing citizens to propose (including electronically) legal acts to the Commission. The present paper offers a conceptual model for the analysis of this eParticipation case, and other similar e-petitioning practices, which is not biased by political ambition or technological determinism. The operational framework proposed aims to understand the nature of communication between citizens, governments, and the civil society among other stakeholders in the contemporary media landscape by using the concept of genre systems for this purpose.