A challenge to engagement

It should be noted, however, that there is an important challenge to this perspective.

As Will Davies has written, part of the current work on remodelling government has focused on freeing public sector management information, with data.gov and data.gov.uk being leading examples. This means:

"Bureaucratic inefficiency and under-performing public services become impossible to conceal. Government comes under the spotlight of (what I've heard Michael Power term) the permanent audit. Pressure from users of public services rises, as they are empowered to know how much better or more efficient the government could be."

But Davies argued that this is only part of the story:

"The paradox of the neo-liberal state has always been that it is managed by self-loathing bureaucrats. It has conducted a recurring rationalist critique of its own rationality, constantly restructuring, reinventing, reimagining its own loathed inefficiencies, but never being able to settle on anything that can be agreed on as efficient. Hence the endless present participles; it is constant work in progress."

So, he said, a 'post-bureaucratic state' as sought by the UK Conservative Party could see publicly shared information replace constant auditing.

"Then let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the piling of audit upon audit, of meta-analysis upon meta-analysis, could gradually go into decline, what sort of state would we have?

"My instinct is that this would certainly deliver transparency, might offer a version of accountability, but would fail to achieve legitimacy. Here's why.

"Our old friend Weber tells us that the legitimacy of the modern state lies chiefly in its capacity to know with some degree of objectivity and to process with some degree of efficiency. The neo-liberal attack on the state is an attack on the possibility of this centralised expert knowledge, based on Hayek's resolutely post-modern claim that objective knowledge is not only impossible, but a more dangerous ambition than the distributed opinion represented by the marketplace."

Davies argues that Government 2.0 could be seen as "the final realisation of the neo-liberal state" with "no auditors, no experts, no objective knowledge, no sense of the common good, just maximum freedom for individuals to form opinions and privately process information".

"But siding with perspective over expertise cannot be the basis for legitimacy. Allowing people to express their frustration or disappointment, but without offering dialogue or improvement at the end of it, removes the security offered by expertise, but without offering anything in its place. Auditors act as the critics of experts, but they do so from some rival position of expertise; they damage legitimacy, but partly so as to then rebuild it. By contrast, a state laid bare only to the audit of general public dissatisfaction is surely heading towards a legitimacy crisis."

He accepted the UK Conservatives might argue that "this is not about knowledge and efficiency at all, but about participation", but warned this could mean that "we get some hybrid of bureaucracy and democracy, that is neither quite as effective as the former, nor as empowering as the latter".

However, the model of policy frameworks, microparties and microgovernance would mean that there are more options available to citizens than just "mouthing off on Facebook" when they are dissatisfied.

They would not just "express their frustration" but could swiftly opt into an alternative framework, or use the tools available to build their own. This is certainly more empowering than the existing model of democracy, and is likely to also prove more effective than the professional bureaucracy in innovation and delivery of policies which work.

This is a much deeper form of participation than simply looking at how money is spent and pointing to the inevitable examples of waste.

On the issue of expert knowledge, as discussed elsewhere, the importance given to this by the public may be in decline in any event. Experts could still make their case, but would need to convince the public of it rather than rely on the wisdom of administrators to implement it.