Regulatory agencies across different sectors, countries and jurisdiction are increasingly engaging citizens in their decision-making. This challenges the received wisdom about the technocratic nature of the contemporary regulatory state. In participatory forms of decision-making, experts need to justify how they take decisions in relation to other forms of knowledge, such as the lived experience of people affected by regulatory decisions. This calls into question the legitimacy of supposedly independent, expertise-based forms of governing markets and protecting health and safety. This paper proposes a larger research project that aims to study the causes and consequences of these changes. We suggest that regulatory agencies adopt such mechanisms when under reputational pressure but that, ironically, the novel mechanisms make them more vulnerable to subsequent public and political pressure. This raises fundamental questions about the future of the regulatory state. To explore these propositions, we propose a cross-country, cross-sector study of participatory processes used by regulatory agencies.