The point of democracy
Any new system of governance and engagement must deliver the principle outcomes that representative democracy has also sought to achieve.
This includes the primary task of giving citizens a stake in the process of their governance, thereby generating legitimacy for the state. And the democratic process provides an agreed means for allocating resources between competing groups and priorities, and balancing points of view on issues like levels of tax and spending.
Parvin and McHugh (2005) have summed this up as "the idea that there is an appropriate balance to be drawn between the individual's right to freedom and the collective good of all and that in the final analysis the government is accountable for its actions to the collective will" [i].
If the existing democratic framework can no longer carry out these functions, can the new model step in?
New forms of microgovernance will prove equally effective in legitimately allocating resources, and indeed may do an even better job as funding will not be spent according to nationally determined rules but according to the wishes of each citizen.
And as the role of the state will now be to ensure that each citizen participates directly in its administration, it will – for a time being at least (see Part IV for further challenges to even this remodelled concept of the state) – overcome the legitimacy crisis caused by the decline of the traditional parties and the end of that model of participation.
Citizens will also be able to support specific policies at any time, not just during elections and not just those which are collected in one manifesto.
As with changes of government or president, it also allows for the implementation of new policies which take the country in a different direction.
On a broader point, Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and a former chief adviser on political strategy to Tony Blair, has written that there is an ongoing challenge to ensure that democracy is "better able to foster an informed and engaging conversation about trade-offs and sacrifices".
By being able to see in real time how one choice opens and closes the door to other choices, this would become much more obvious.
And as Weinberger wrote in Everything is Miscellaneous: "The knowledge exists in the connections and in the gaps; it requires active engagement."
Harnessing the power of such micropolicies also provides a role for all the microparties which cannot be represented through normal democratic means.
Instead of seeking seats in a Parliament or Congress, they would develop policy frameworks in accordance with their beliefs. As this would still be a complex task, it would require organisation and knowledge to complete it.
UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron has said the internet has created a 'post-bureaucratic' age in which the internet means the end of monolithic states. But it will be a post-political, post-democratic age – the 'bureaucracy', in the non-pejorative sense, will in fact assume a far more important role.
While his Conservative Party proposes dispersing power from central to local government and communities, it will eventually have to go further than that, giving back to the people the power of the state and the power his party has had over it.
And this can be expected to prompt participation in ways that the current system cannot match.
As Weinberger writes in Everything is Miscellaneous, in a world of user-generated, crowd-sourced, open source information, people will have to think more for themselves about the information they receive.
"Deciding what to believe is now our burden. It always was, but in the paper-order world where publishing was so expensive that we needed people to be filters, it was easier to think our passivity was an inevitable part of learning; we thought knowledge just worked that way...
"Authority now comes from enabling us inescapably fallible creatures to explore the differences among us, together."
So microgovernment could generate engagement which is both quantitatively and qualitatively greater than democratic forms of government are currently achieving.
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