Results, not process

The form of engagement envisaged in a 'participation state' also addresses a further issue about the current nature of democracy – the tendency for process to triumph over outcomes.

Two significant trends over recent years have been the increase in the use of judicial reviews and ever more pressure for transparency.

Neither of these are entirely compatible with genuine democracy, and in combination they can be positively undemocratic.

Judicial reviews see administrative decisions, and sometimes policy choices, challenged and overturned in the courts on grounds of procedural unfairness.

And pressure for transparency about the political process is based upon the belief that voters are entitled to know who is lobbying politicians and civil servants.

But greater transparency about ministerial meetings with lobbyists (who can be, after all, be anyone from members of the public to charities or environmental groups as well as evil corporations) serves largely to prompt fresh claims that the process leading up to a given policy decision was unfair.

While neither is wholly undesirable, both of these trends have the effect of shifting the focus of debate towards issues of process and away from what should be the correct policy to deliver the most desirable outcomes.

Inevitably, somebody will always fail to get the policy outcome they want, and blame an unfair process rather than the fact that they simply failed to make a sufficiently convincing argument for their proposals.

And the bigger, more complex and more important the decision, the more often this seems to be the case.

This means the focus of the debate is increasingly on a set of grievances about process rather than on getting the outcome right and justifying (or not) the decision to the public.

So beyond a certain point, transparency actually serves to undermine democracy rather than promote good governance.

And when the disputes over these process issues are taken to the courts then attempts to improve transparency in fact hand the issue to judges, thereby removing it from voters and elections.

In a system in which citizens are in effect forming their own microgovernments, both of these trends become far less important.

The issue of process will matter less because it will be open to any campaigner to set up a rival policy framework to those they disagree with.

And claims of bias will also become irrelevant because the state will be the neutral administrator of whichever policy its citizens have individually opted into.

This will both shift the focus back to the issue of outcomes and be far more democratic in that campaigners of all kinds will have to make the argument with the public rather than rely on judges and issues of procedure to get their way.

While recourse to the courts might still be an option, it would be hard to imagine a swifter way to alienate the public from a particular cause than using law suits to deny them the ability to choose certain options.