Delivering microgovernment

What does microgovernment mean in practice and how can it be combined with an expansion of microparties?

Citizens will make their choices not by voting for a party to govern but opting into the policy frameworks of any of the vastly increased number of parties.

Each citizen is able to make a separate choice for each different policy area.

Any voter could choose, for example, the health framework of one party but the education framework of another. This means that citizens will get not a monolithic manifesto and all its compromises, but the policies for each subject area that they specifically want.

In fact, their choices will have to be even greater than this because in order for the system to ensure that the services which have the broadest public support are delivered, citizens will be given the freedom to rank policies in order of preference within each framework area. If their first choice policy is not supported by enough other people to be viably implemented then they may get their second choice, and so on down through all the options.

And of course if they are not satisfied with the parties and policies that already exist then the tools will be available to help them create and promote new parties, covering one specific policy area or any combination of areas.

Each of the niche parties will be able to devise and have delivered by the state, if chosen by enough people, its own policy frameworks for the range of policy areas.

This is a step beyond a personalised state or microadministration. Microgovernance means that any party or range of parties can provide the policies which at any time could be delivered to any viable subset of the population which wants them.

And of course, in many areas there would be no requirement to select policy frameworks every four or five years. Only subject to any planning that is required to allow for their effective administration, citizens could change their frameworks at will, whenever they feel their existing frameworks are not delivering or if there is a better choice on offer.

Traditional monolithic governance is replaced by personalised governance delivered through the policies of the microparties.

This will introduce far more competition into the way in which policies are administered, and people will be able to react as evidence emerges that a given policy does or does not work effectively.

As Anderson wrote in The Long Tail: "Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge."

While it is less difficult to imagine, for example, how a micropolicy about a school curriculum could be administered, it is more complex to consider how this would apply to areas such as criminal law.

This is because there is a difference between a policy, which can often be largely implemented by administrative fiat in order to achieve specific goals, and a law which is enforceable through the legal system.

Dealing with these issues is the subject of the next section.