Citizen Engagement with Technocratic Bodies: What Conditions Affect Willingness to Participate?

Independent technocratic bodies such as regulatory agencies and central banks are deliberately insulated from party politics, elections, and public opinion. Yet, many of these organisations increasingly rely on engagement with citizens, and use tools such as surveys, focus groups, forums, and consultation procedures to gather information about the economic behaviour of citizens, as well as about the public’s views and priorities. Though counter-intuitive at first sight, such technocratic engagement is – among other things – aimed at enhancing policy effectiveness and organisational trust. Yet, these desired outcomes depend on the willingness of (diverse groups of) citizens to participate. Extant research on citizen participation in policy processes has shown that such willingness cannot be taken for granted. It may still be a greater challenge for technocratic bodies whose existence the public is often not aware of, and whose role may not seem directly relevant to citizens’ lives. The proposed paper seeks to improve our understanding of citizens’ willingness to engage with technocratic bodies by taking as a starting point the variation in the new forms of engagement employed by independent economic regulators. Building on this variation, we design a conjoint survey experiment to assess under what conditions citizens are more likely to engage, and embed the experiment in a representative survey that we field in the United Kingdom, where regulatory agencies have been particularly active in terms of public engagement. The research also explores whether and how willingness to engage varies between groups of citizens. Thus, we seek to contribute technocracy-specific insights to the wider literature on citizen engagement, and to shed light on the potential of a form of engagement that is gaining prominence but is, at the same time, far from straightforward.