Conventional explanations for the growth in the numbers and variety of unelected bodies focus on the demanding external environment facing modern governments and the pressures for managerial reform that this created. Such managerial accounts offer important but insufficient explanations. They avoid talking about how public policy is formed. Public policy formation involves two elements – empirical judgements about the facts and political and ethical judgements about the values involved. This leads to a different type of rationale for the creation of unelected bodies – an institutional separation between bodies responsible for the two different types of judgement. Unelected bodies take on a special responsibility for empirical judgements in policy-making and elected bodies focus on value judgements.

The shift to a service economy

The most general explanation for the growth of unelected bodies lies with the forces of ‘globalisation’. Globalisation opened up to a broader array of external influences previously sheltered activities, including government structures and government policy-making. Change became inevitable.

Because it is such a broad term, ‘globalisation’ by itself is an unsatisfactory explanation in this area just as it is in others. A slightly more precise explanation is that the changes in the structure of government have paralleled broad changes in the structure of the economies of developed countries. The change of particular relevance has been the striking switch in recent decades away from output from manufacturing and industrial activity to output from the service economy.