Introduction

For the ideas set out in these essays to be feasible, they will need a significant number of citizens to be prepared to engage with the political choices and online tools that would be available to them.

But the participation of the kind proposed here is hard to compare to measures of participation in existing systems.

These proposals set out a rolling freedom to participate, and do not require participation in any one specific event. This being the case, a concept such as turnout in an election becomes meaningless.

An alternative measure might define participation as the proportion of people making a certain number of active choices over the course of a year, a decade or whenever certain 'life events' such as getting married or having children occur.

But, however it might be defined, participation still matters because it will, in part, provide the base on which the legitimacy of the state can be maintained.

In relation to this it is worth noting a difference between apathy and disengagement.

Apathy can be thought of as indifference to decisions which are made, while a citizen who is disengaged may still be interested in issues and causes even though they do not participate in the structures or campaigns that affect them.

An apathetic citizen doesn't care enough about issues to be interested in them and feel emotionally distant from the discussion to be had and choices to be made.

Wikipedia notes that US novelist John Dos Passos wrote in 1950: "Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension." ^[i]

If this proposed 'cure' is correct then it may be that comprehension in the form of seeing a much closer association between political decisions and outcomes which directly affect the individual will lead to a reduction in apathy.

Disengagement, on the other hand, may be caused by structures and language which deter participation, making it hard for people to take part even when they do wish to contribute.

Alternatively, a more benign explanation is that people may be broadly content with the decisions that get made, at least on the big issues if not on every last detail, and feel little inclination to invest their time in seeking minor changes.

But whether in relation to apathy or disengagement, and whatever the explanation, there is a clear need to connect policies to people with more clarity than is achieved at the moment.

One of the advantages of microgovernment and the selection of policy frameworks is that citizens will be deciding specifically on policies, not on parties or politicians.

So if citizens are disengaged because they don't feel existing political structures are relevant to them, then new structures need not imply the same level of disinterest.

But it is one thing to base a new system of e-government on a system which relies on participation. It is another to argue that people would actually make use of this freedom to engage in participation.

Given the importance of engagement to these ideas, the following sections take a closer look at some of the available evidence on the issue, ranging from what participation actually means to experiences of disengagement and a look at who does participate.

There are also two case studies, one looking at some experimental evidence on the effect of the internet on collective action and the other examining some of the interesting work that has been done on partcipatory budgeting.

The latter is interesting because it involves the public directly in resource allocation, giving them the final say on how a particular budget is spent, a small-scale equivalent of the ideas set out here.

Lessons from these experiences can begin to provide some clues about how increased opportunities to participate may be used.

Footnotes:

[i] Quoted by Wikipedia contributors, 'Apathy', Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apathy&oldid=333165263 [January 16, 2010].