User Group

The definition is symmetrical and both halves are doing work. Everyone affected is included, and nobody unaffected is, which rules out both the exclusion of those who will bear consequences and the inclusion of those who will not. That second exclusion is the unusual one, since it removes the majority's right to decide matters that do not touch them, and Marsh's objection to direct democracy rests on it, because allowing votes from people unaffected by an issue produces not just uninformed decisions but persecution of minorities. The range clause makes the concept general rather than a governance mechanism for large questions, since a user group of one person covers a private decision and a user group of the entire world covers a planetary one, with the same principle applying at both ends. Constitution by the action rather than by membership is what distinguishes this from every territorial arrangement. The current political structure does not recognize that every system is not of concern to everyone in a region, or that many systems are of far wider concern than one state, which is the mismatch the term resolves. Its role in the governance design is to hold authority. Ultimate choice must always be left with the entire user group, an epistemic community is a knowledge resource only, and shunning can instantly remove power in an open system, keeping the real power with the user group rather than with the experts. Self-governance is defined as governance by user group.

The all-affected principle in democratic theory holds that those affected by a decision should have a say in it, and it has a substantial literature addressing exactly the boundary problem Marsh's definition resolves by fiat, since determining who is affected is contested and can itself be a political question. Stakeholder theory in management makes a weaker version of the claim. Subsidiarity locates decisions at the lowest competent level. Marsh's version is the strongest form of the all-affected principle, since she makes it definitional rather than aspirational, and inherits the boundary problem in return, since establishing who is affected becomes the site of contest.