400+ Citations on the

Transparency Problem
We collect citations from political scientists, journalists and politicos
who investigate the pitfalls of congressional transparency. A large
percentage suggest that congressional transparency expressly favors
lobbyists, special interests and those in power.

By D’Angelo, Ranalli & Nsubuga – February 18, 2019

   

Citations
We present citations with links to original sources – each investigating the perils of
government transparency. For more on this three-year study see the papers and talks
on this site. For a summary of the theory click on this link here.

1
If we open up our [committees] to the public, every lobbyist in America is
going to be there.
– Rep Harley Staggers (D-WV) 1973
Senate and House Open Up their Sessions

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 2
Two decades later, a er the advent of sunshine laws, we know better. Open
markup sessions o en give organized interests a powerful advantage over
inattentive citizens, for they can monitor exactly who is doing what to benefit and
to hurt them.
– Douglas Arnold 1990 (Princeton) – The Logic of Congressional Action

3
The idea was to make the process more ‘democratic’, but in practice sunshine
measures intensified the access of lobbyists.
– James Payne 1991 – Culture of Spending

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 The Washington Post 1984 – Opening Up Congress (pdf 1.1MBs) 4

5
The enactment of the ‘sunshine’ laws, which had opened up committee
legislative dra ing sessions to the public in order to dilute the power of business
lobbyists, had precisely the opposite effect. They enabled business lobbyists to
monitor the votes of each elected official more closely.
– David Vogel 1989 – The Political Power of Business

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 6
Clarity and publicity kill... Officials who need to fear that their internal
deliberations will be made public are less positioned to make effective public
policy.
– Jerry Z. Muller 2018 – The Tyranny of Metrics

7
Since the Sunshine Rule, markup sessions are very popular events in the
legislative process...Cueing up for a markup, and sweating the markup line is part
of the lobbyist’s job.
– Lobbyist John Zorack 1990 – The Lobbying Handbook

8
Some former sticklers for sunshine agreed with members who said bills were
better when dra ed away from lobbyists’ watchful eyes. Conversely, as some of
these lobbyists sensed a slippage of their influence over the bill-writing process,
they became the 1980s’ proponents of sunshine in Congress.
– Jaqueline Calmes 1987 – CQ – Fading Sunshine Reforms

9
“Sunshine” changes have le members visible and vulnerable to attentive
publics, most o en organized interests.
– Larry Rieselbach 1994 – Encyclopedia of Policy Studies

1
Had the deliberations been open while going on, the clamors of faction
(special interests) would have prevented any satisfactory result.
– Alexander Hamilton 1792 – History of the Republic

1
Transparency is a useful tool for lobbyists – it enables them to keep better
track of their competitors, and to demand equal access for themselves.
– David Frum 2014 – The Transparency Trap 
 Francis Fukuyama 2019 – Via Twitter 1

1
Transparency in government causes the very corruption it aims to prevent,
and the problem is universal.
– Michael Gilbert 2018 – Transparency and Corruption

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 1
The more open a system becomes, the more easily it can be penetrated by
money, lobbyists and fanatics...Congress can now be monitored and influenced as
never before. As a result, lobbies, which do most of the monitoring and influencing,
have gained power.
– Fareed Zakaria 2003 – Future of Freedom

1
[The] adoption of open markup sessions, probably accounted most for
exposing members to interest group pressures. Conversely, adopting closed
sessions in 1983 seems to have reversed that trend.
– Sheldon D Pollack 1995 – A New Dynamics of Tax PolicY?

1
The open meetings rules of the last ten years have lowered some barriers
separating Members from group pressures. Lobbyists now attend markup sessions
and conference committee sessions that used to be held in closed session. In this
respect, Members are no longer as insulated from lobbyists as when they were able
to conduct official business behind closed doors, and pressure groups are better
able to hold Members accountable for their actions.
– CRS Report 1986 – Congress and Pressure Groups

1
Congressional dysfunction started well before the Trump presidency. It has
been growing for decades, despite promise a er promise and proposal a er
proposal to reverse it. Many explanations have been offered, from the rise of
partisan media to the growth of gerrymandering to the explosion of corporate
money. But one of the most important causes is usually overlooked: transparency.
Something usually seen as an antidote to corruption and bad government, it turns
out, is leading to both.
– James D’Angelo & Brent Ranalli 2019
The Dark Side of Sunlight (Foreign Affairs Magazine)

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 Rep Rob Woodall 2019 - House Modernization 1

On March 27, 2019, The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress and the Modernization
Committee of the GOP discussed the pitfalls of transparency during a hearing about congressional reforms.
And at 1:05:06, Representative Rob Woodall appears to become the first member in the history of the US
Congress to openly question the 1970s sunshine laws. He suggests that increased transparency might be at the
root of a number of institutional problems with Congress. Here is Woodall’s statement:

“Well I thought that was interesting in Mr. Wolfensberger’s testimony, he said he’s got six things that make
these reform efforts successful. By my count four of the six things were things too much transparency might
threaten 1. private informal meetings are necessary 2. check your partisan guns at the at the door 3. soliciting
views from other members who are not on the on the panel 4. flexibility and the ability to compromise. At
some point you know the reason I can’t take pictures on the second floor of the Capitol is you never know who I
might be talking to and I want the freedom to be able to talk to who I want to talk to. We don’t have that
dynamic. Zoe said we’re not gonna roll back cameras on the floor. I’m sure that’s true. It might have been, who
mentioned transparency, it was you Mr. strand. Are we at a point where we have so many other ways to
communicate to get the word out that it would be okay to dial back on some degrees of transparency because
we’re highlighting that transparency elsewhere?”

Unfortunately Woodall directs the question to Mark Strand who evades, immediately turning the conversation
elsewhere. But Strand he was followed by Don Wolfensberger who takes up the question saying that
transparency is “a double edged sword.”

1
Access is vital in lobbying. If you can’t get in your door, you can’t make your
case.
– Jack Abramoff 2011 – The 'Lobbyist Safecracker Method'

*NOTE: This citation pairs well with one by Lee Drutman who, when talking about lobbyists
cites an old Washington adage which states “If you are not at the table, you are probably on
the menu.”

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 2
Markets and states are likely to “capture” transparency arrangements for
their own goals more frequently, which will not necessarily be aligned with the
original normative ideals of democracy and participation. Transparency is
marketized and monopolized to gain power and profits, it is used as a form of
public relations in symbolic politics, it functions in disinformation and information
overflow campaigns, it is part of state and market surveillance of citizen-
consumers, and it can further empower the powerful as much as the powerless.
– Arthur P.J. Mol 2014
The Lost Innocence of Transparency in Environmental Politics

2
Lobbyist Gary Hymel stated that C-SPAN cuts his office workload in half. “We
don’t have to go to the House and try to keep a mental note of what’s going on...
When a bill is being debated on the House floor... we take notes, eat lunch, and
drink coffee, and tape it for a permanent record.”
– Stephen Frantzich & John Sullivan 1996 – The C-SPAN Revolution

2
The open hearings and mark-up sessions encouraged by the reform
movement were one example of the changed environment. In 1973, some 30
percent of committee meetings were closed to the public, but in 1975 only 2
percent were closed. Lobbyists and special interest representatives took advantage
of open meetings to press their cases. As one member of the committee observed,
“Open meetings put special interests into the process and gave them an active
input.” Another member commented disapprovingly that at one markup session,
several members of the committee “went down and sat in the audience and talked
with a specific interest and wrote an amendment, came back up and offered it.”
– Donald R. Kennon & Rebecca M. Rogers 1989
Ways and Means a Bicentennial History 1789-1989

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 2
Closed meetings facilitate getting the House’s work done, and public sessions
o en turn into wastes of time.
– Rep Burleson (Texas) 1957 – Advocates of Openness

*NOTE: This citation, from a member of Congress, takes place a decade before Congress
opened all its committees.

2
We have now had a half-century of experimenting with more open processes.
How is that working out? When greater transparency in Congress arrived in the
1970s, did that mean special interest had more power or less? There’s a simple (if
imperfect) test. If special interests had less power, then it would not have been
worthwhile to invest as much in lobbying, so more transparency should have been
followed by a reduction in lobbying. Of course, the reverse is what actually
happened: Lobbying rose dramatically in the 1970s, and has risen further since
then. Apparently, greater political openness makes spending on lobbying more
worthwhile, not less.
– Timothy Taylor 2019 – When Special Interests Play in the Sunlight

2
Well, going back to the seventies and opening up committees, who attends?
You try to reach out to a broad public, but the people who show up are the people
who have a stake in the outcome. And so as we open up committees what that
opens Congress up to, is more pressure from organized interests, because they’re
the ones with the strongest incentive to pay attention. And so you want to reach
your constituents, you want to reach that broader audience, but most Americans
are not that tuned into public affairs. And we don’t want to ask too much of that of
that broad public. And as we try to reach out and make the system more
representative and more accountable, we wind up making it less representative –
and accountable to organized groups as opposed to that broad public.
– Frances Lee 2019 – Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress

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 2
Lobbyists and journalists report an increasing use of C-SPAN for monitoring
the political process. During the early C-SPAN era, when Washington, D.C . lacked
cable service, lobbying organizations dominated the list of subscribers to Capitol
Connection. Today C-SPAN plays continuously in the background in most lobbying
offices. As one trade association lobbyist pointed out: “I sit in my office every
morning, watching C-SPAN.”
– Stephen Frantzich & John Sullivan 1996 – The C-SPAN Revolution

2
We were a conquering army. We came here to take the Bastille. We destroyed
[Congress] by turning the lights on.
– Rep. George Miller (D-CA) 2018 – The Class of ‘74

The full citation:

Members of the Class believed that if they were able to make the institution and its
procedures more transparent to the public, the House and American politics would
change forever. “We were a conquering army,” recalled George Miller of California,
who had been elected at the age of 29 a er serving for five years as a staff aide for
the California Senate majority leader. “We came here to take the Bastille. We
destroyed the institution by turning the lights on.” - From Lawrence "Class of '73"

2
As Brent Ranalli, James G. D’Angelo, and David C. King have argued, when
Congress made the votes on committees public, they empowered lobbyists to
contract more effectively with members of Congress – or at least to monitor and
pressure them more effectively. When the votes were secret, it was hard to know
whether a deal was respected. With sunlight, everyone knows who upheld the
bargain . That effect thus lowers the cost of contracting; lower the cost and you get
more contracting aka, corruption.
– Lawrence Lessig 2018 – America Compromised

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 2
Through the open committee hearing, an institution of comparatively recent
origin, the lobbyist now is able to speak with authority to Congress for the group or
organization he represents. The open committee hearing has worked a revolution
in lobbying methods. It has permitted the lobbyist to have access to members of
Congress through the front instead of the back door, and has given to the title
“legislative agent” something of a professional standing. In the proposal for
registration of lobbyists, many of them see a welcome recognition by Congress of
the new dignity of their calling and of the importance of the part they now play in
the making of legislative decisions.
– CQ Reports 1928 – Changing Character of Washington Lobbies

3
The 1970s reforms that opened up congressional committees and the House
floor have yielded disappointment and dysfunction on a larger scale. Initiated in
earnest with the enactment of the 1970 LRA, these reforms are now believed by
many to have contributed to an increase in special interest influence and a decline
in institutional comity and capacity. The glare of publicity made it more difficult for
members of Congress to negotiate with each other in candid, creative, and
productive ways; rising levels of partisanship since the 1970s aggravated this
difficulty. Lobbyists, moreover, no longer had to wait in the lobby during markup
sessions and other committee meetings. While these meetings were in theory
thrown open to all, only deep-pocketed outfits were able to send representatives—
and to punish or reward legislators based on what the legislators said or how they
voted—in any systematic fashion. By the 1980s, members and observers of
Congress were routinely asserting that laws like the LRA, “which had opened up
committee legislative dra ing sessions to the public in order to dilute the power of
business lobbyists, had precisely the opposite effect. They enabled business
lobbyists to monitor the votes of each elected official more closely.”
– David Pozen 2018 – Transparency’s Ideological Dri

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 3
(If the Senate deliberations were televised) there would be less attention to
legislative work and more to publicity seeking, there would be less time spent in
committee and more on the floor, and the Senate floor would become an arena in
which to register unrestrained advertisements of self instead of being held in
reserve for the occasional registration of intensely held minority opinions and
interests.
– Richard Fenno 1989 – The Senate through the Looking Glass - The Debate over
Television

3
The theory that ‘diplomacy should proceed always frankly and in the public
view’ has led to negotiation being broadcast and televised, and to all rational
discussion being abandoned in favour of interminable propaganda speeches
addressed, not to those with whom the delegate is supposed to be negotiating, but
to his own public at home.
– Sir Harold Nicolson 1953 – The Evolution of Diplomatic Method

3
The opening up of the legislative process can make lawmakers much more
directly accountable to interest groups whose support they may need for
reelection. Lobbyists, a er all, now actually sit in on committee markup sessions.
This may constrain the policymaking efforts of lawmakers to actions that serve the
interests of narrow groups at the expense of the broader public good.
– Joeseph Bessette 1994 – Mild Voice of Reason

3
Many Republicans will say privately that they understand the science, but if
they talk about climate change publicly they will prompt a primary challenge from
the right — so they stay quiet, at best, or join the obstructionists in questioning the
science. There has been no major change in climate science since 1979; what has
changed is the politics.
– William K. Reilly 2018 – The Term “Republican Environmentalist” Is Not an
Oxymoron
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 3
The primary users of the Freedom of Information Act are not journalists and
crusaders seeking to reveal illicit activities; they are businesses seeking to find out
what government regulators are up to and what their competitors have disclosed
to government agencies. Similarly, Congressional reforms requiring publicly
recorded committee votes are not of most use to the news media or constituents;
they help lobbyists verify whether targeted officials have lived up to their promises
to vote for or against major amendments.
– Thomas Edsall 2011 – Putting Political Reform Right (NYTimes)

3
Most members genuinely want[ed] to do what they thought was in the
national interest if they could. That wasn’t always easy to do, however. But it was
easier to do before the passage of the Sunshine laws [which required that public
business be conducted in the open]. When an interest group came in, you would
say, “Gosh darn, I tried to support you. I really did. The chairman bent my arm.”
Then, to protect yourself, you would tell the chairman that when those guys came
in, to tell them that you really fought hard on their issue.
– Sen Robert Packwood 2003 – Future of Freedom

3
“It’s a real dilemma for liberal reformers,” says Jeff Drumtra, director of the
Tax Reform Research Group, an arm of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen organization.
“When you look at recent tax bills, the best ones have come out of closed sessions.
You take what you can get and hope someday you can get a good bill at an open
meeting.”
– Pamela Fessler 1985 – Rewriting Tax Code Behind Closed Doors

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 3
One example of how a closed session provides protection from special
interests came when the committee voted to give banks even better tax treatment
than they now enjoy… In the initial recorded vote, only one Republican member of
the panel voted against the more favorable treatment for banks. But when the
committee voted a second time and decided to reverse the decision, it did so on a
voice vote (secret vote). Neither the public nor the bank lobbyists waiting in the
hallway knew who changed sides.
– Lea Donosky 1985 – Tax Reform Behind Closed Doors

3
It’s not that you want to ignore the public. It’s just that the lobbyists, the
pressure groups, the trade associations – they all have their pet projects. If you put
something together in public, the Members are looking over at the lobbyists and
the lobbyists are giving the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ signs.
– Rep Dan Rostenkowski 2002 – Too Much of a Good Thing

Jane Mansbridge 2010 – Against Accountability 4

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 4
One major role of politicians is to broker those diverse interests and
sensibilities and to arrive at arrangements that bridge differences. This strategy
entails negotiation, trading off some interests against others in an attempt to
attain a compromise that will be tolerable to a number of interests, though rarely
entirely satisfactory to any one of them. To put it another way, it involves the
bargaining away of many positions, at least as defined by the interested parties.
More o en than not, that is possible only when the negotiation takes place
protected from the view of the various claimants, each of whom might try to veto
any compromise that struck at their publicly defined, “transparent” position. What
politicians call ‘‘creative give and take” ideologues or representatives of special
interests call “betrayal.” That is why on sensitive matters, the negotiating process is
most effective when it takes place behind closed doors.
– Jerry Z. Muller 2018 – The Tyranny of Metrics

4
By now, the empirical evidence on the deliberative benefits of closed-door
interactions seems incontrovertible.
– Warren & Mansbridge 2013 – Political Negotiation

4
While we o en assume more transparent voting rules is a benefit, an
examination of those rules and their origins suggests this is not always the case. In
one of the few detailed discussions of the origins of recorded voting, Luce (1922)
stressed that legislators needed to remain aware of both the costs and benefits of
transparency. Such awareness is evident when we consider the substantial
observed variance amongst recorded voting rules across history and legislative
bodies.
– Lynch, Madonna & Kisaalita 2018 – Broken Record - Transparency, Position
Taking and Recorded Voting in the US Congress (from upcoming 2019 book)

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 4
[From 1971, CQ article discussing the resistance to opening committees]
Public markup sessions are rare. Most committees prefer to write legislation in
private for a variety of reasons. Some members believe that open meetings tend to
encourage greater posturing and longer speeches for public consumption. Others
think committee action is hindered by the necessity of observing formal
procedures. One committee, which held open markup sessions in the past but not
in 1971, found that the open meetings usually attracted more lobbyists than
public.
– CQ Almanac 1971 – 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act Has Little Impact

4
It is important to ask, moreover, who benefits from the constraints imposed
by openness. Theoretically, “the public” does. In practice, however, openness too
o en serves the narrow purposes of special interests. Do the news media flock to
our meetings? Do the public interest groups vie for seats in packed hearing rooms?
Do interested consumers wait in line to hear debates on the hazards they face?
Hardly.

But, without fail, you’ll find lawyers and lobbyists galore, all representing special
interests. Those attending our meetings and burying us with F.O.I.A. requests are
the very ones against whom the commission is considering action. They are paid to
do just that.

In enacting the Sunshine and F.O.I.A. legislation, Congress wanted to give specific
powers and tools to the public to guard against undue influence by special
interests. Yet the very interests meant to be watched over have become the
watchdogs. They, not the public, most o en reap the benefits of openness, and at
very high cost to the ability of government agencies to do what is expected of
them.
– Stuart Statler 1981 – Let the Sunshine In?

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 4
With hearings and markups increasingly open to public scrutiny, party
leaders and their interest groups were able to keep a closer eye and apply
increased pressure on the decisions of committee members.
– Julian Zelizer 1998 – Taxing America

4
Notably, the House in the 1970s for the first time introduced recorded voting
in the Committee of the Whole (Smith 1989). As Roberts and Smith (2003)
convincingly demonstrate, votes on amendments in the Committee of the Whole
tend to be far more partisan and divisive than other types of House votes. The
introduction of recorded voting on COW amendments, along with the ease of
electronic voting, quickly led to an explosion of amendment votes, driven largely
by minority-party Republicans who sought to force members of the majority party
to take difficult or embarrassing votes, which added a whole new and divisive set
of votes to the roll-call record. As Smith explains, “[minority Republicans] actively
sought ways to challenge committee products, raise ideologically charged issues,
and force recorded votes. [Robert] Bauman [R-MD] even entertained requests for
recorded-vote amendments from Republican challengers to Democratic
incumbents in order to compel Democrats to take politically dangerous positions”
(1989, 34).
– William Egar 2016 – Tarnishing Opponents, Polarizing Congress

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 4
The switch from the quiet back-room deals of the Ways and Means
Committee to the more open procedures of the Finance Committee and the Senate
floor shows how tax preferences thrive in the sunshine. It is relatively easy for
legislators to turn down proposals for expanding tax preferences, or even to
approve contractions, if their actions are hidden from public view. It is considerably
more difficult to do so if legislators must vote publicly, either in committee or on
the floor, to deny their constituents a share of group benefits. As Congress began in
the 1970s to write tax bills more openly, legislators faced an increasing number of
roll-call votes on tax preferences. In fact, during this one decade there were more
than twice as many roll-call votes in favor of creating or modifying tax preferences
as there had been in the six previous decades. As legislators voted publicly on
these matters, they quite naturally voted to approve expanded tax preferences.
– Douglas Arnold 1990 (Princeton) – The Logic of Congressional Action

4
Of course, most roll call positions considered in isolation are not likely to
cause much of a ripple at home. But broad voting patterns can and do; member
“ratings” calculated by the Americans for Democratic Action, Americans for
Constitutional Action, and other outfits are used as guidelines in the deploying of
electoral resources. And particular issues o en have their alert publics. Some
national interest groups watch the votes of all congressmen on single issues and
ostentatiously try to reward or punish members for their positions.
– David Mayhew 1974 – The Electoral Connection

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 5
Information, data and the unbounded flow of more and more speech can be
politicized...when that happens...transparency and the unbounded flow of speech
become instruments in the production of the very inequalities (economic, political,
educational) that the gospel of openness promises to remove. And the more this
gospel is preached and believed, the more that the answer to everything is
assumed to be data uncorrupted by interests and motives, the easier it will be for
interest and motives to operate under transparency’s cover...Because it is an article
of their faith that politics are bad and the unmediated encounter with data is good,
internet prophets will fail to see the political implications of what they are trying to
do, for in their eyes political implications are what they are doing away with.
– Stanley Fish 2018 – ‘Transparency’ is the Mother of Fake News

Senator Howell Helfin 1986 - A Sonnet on Transparency 5

Turn the spotlight over here.

Focus the camera at my place.
Pages, please don't come near,
Otherwise, you just might block my face.

Some have made the worst claim yet,

That viewers will tire from the dull plot,
But I'll be willing to make a bet
Lobbyists will watch a whole lot.

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 5
The recorded teller vote, he recognized, is in principle good for democracy,
but even this has another side. ‘The amending process became a ‘gotcha’ process
rather than a legislative process. It enabled all of these single-issue groups to get a
roll call on everything and run a TV ad against you financed by special interests’
– Rep. David Obey 2014 – Schudson (Rise of Right to Know)

5
Full transparency in government, in professional-client relations, and in
personal life can do great harm. It threatens privacy. It threatens relations of
intimacy that invariably are built on closely held confidences. In government or
other decision-making groups it inhibits honest conversation. It may expose
vulnerable individuals or groups to intimidation by powerful and potentially
malevolent authorities.
– Michael Schudson 2014 – The Rise of Right to Know

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Catherine Rudder 1977 – Committee Reform 5

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 5
A broad movement toward “government in the sunshine” resulted in
widespread changes in the internal processes of governing institutions. In
Congress, for example, the early 1970s saw the opening of many committee
meetings to the public and a movement away from anonymous voting procedures
(voice, standing, and teller voting) in favor of putting everything on the record, a
development that accelerated a er electronic voting was instituted. Although
government reformers believed that greater transparency would make it more
difficult for members of Congress to conceal votes cast on behalf of special
interests, they seem to have ignored the symmetric possibility that more openness
made it much easier for special interests to determine whether members were
actually delivering on their end of the deal. Many scholars pondered the
consequences of congressional decentralization in the 1970s, but fewer reflected
on the consequences of making the activities of its members so much more visible
to interest groups.
– Mo Fiorina 2012 – Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation

5
In order to encourage consensus, since 1983, the chairman has held more
closed committee meetings than his predecessor. Although open meetings during
the “sunshine” era of the 1970s were meant to improve the committee’s
proceedings by exposing them to public scrutiny, the public that attended
committee meetings was composed mainly of lobbyists. Committee members
appreciate the opportunity closed meetings provide for candid discussion, and
they believe that their legislative product is improved because of closed sessions.
Bill Frenzel (R-MN), for instance, has reversed his opposition to closed meetings:
“Since our meetings have been closed, our work has been less flawed… and our
consensuses much stronger. I think it’s the only way to fly.”
– Donald R. Kennon & Rebecca M. Rogers 1989 – Ways and Means a Bicentennial
History 1789-1989

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 5
The [1911] rules served to break up the small clique in power and gave the
representatives generally more control of procedure. This was a blow to the old
lobby. It was patently impossible to attempt to cajole or bribe an entire Congress.
Another reform in the legislative procedure that tended to improve the methods of
the lobbyists was the adoption on the part of Congress in the early years of this
century of the policy of holding on all important bills, open committee hearings
which the proponents and the opponents of a measure might attend and there
state, frankly and publicly, their attitude toward the legislation under
consideration. Only the hearings of the Appropriations Committee are now held in
executive session as a general rule. By thus openly testifying before committees the
lobbyists of legitimate interests can make their appeal to a much wider audience.
Not only Congress but the whole country as well may know their arguments for a
bill. The frankness of the legitimate interests makes it necessary for the
questionable lobbyist to assume a like guise. It is not possible to work behind
“closed doors” to the same extent. The general public is thus enabled to
understand more clearly the forces that are interested in certain legislation.”
– Pendelton Herring 1929 – Group Representation Before Congress

5
The impact of congressional reform upon the substance of Ways and Means
legislation was not precisely what reformers had hoped for. Committee member
William J. Green (D-PA) observed a er the first year of the Ullman committee that
liberal expectations had proven to be “a lot of journalistic excess,” even though the
composition of the committee had been altered in a liberal direction… Opening up
the committee procedure, paradoxically perhaps, opened tax legislation to
demands for even greater tax reductions and benefits that were not always in the
public interest.
– Donald R. Kennon & Rebecca M. Rogers 1989 – Ways and Means a Bicentennial
History 1789-1989

5
The day secrecy is abolished, negotiation of any kind will become impossible.
– Jules Cambon 1935 – Secret Diplomacy

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 6
It is a truism of government that compromise cannot be pressed in public;
the open forum of the parliamentary floor is well designed for ideology and
rhetoric, but the real areas of agreement are more o en to be found in committees,
corridors, and cloakrooms.
– Floyd Matson 1955 – In Defense of Compromise

6
The results [of opening up the conference committees in 1975] is that
under the watchful eye of lobbyists, conferees tend to fight harder for provisions
they might have dropped quietly in the interests of bicameral agreement. In 1981,
for example, a key farm lobbyist was credited with influencing the agricultural
conference “just by sitting in the front row.” His presence was significant because
“members know that he will report back to the sugar growers telling them who
their friends are, and his mere presence reminds the lawmakers how the game is
played.”
– Longley & Oleszek 1989 – Bicameral Politics

6
In an open meeting, the lobbyist knows “who does what, says what, and
stands for what.” The conferee’s decision is there for all to see, and “promise-
making includes promise keeping.” Besides pressures on conferees arising from
lobbyists’ presence, open conference sessions give lobbyists and other interested
parties the ability to know more precisely and accurately what is going on. When
conferences were closed, a lobbyist’s knowledge of the proceedings was less
certain because he generally could monitor the conferences only through
information supplied him by conferees who favored his viewpoint. Allies are not
always perfect information sources, especially if they have modified or wavered in
their initial views and positions. Now, having more complete and direct
information through personal observation of conference negotiations, lobbyists
can better ensure that their influence and persuasive efforts bear fruit.
– Longley & Oleszek 1989 – Bicameral Politics

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 6
In many cases, however, there is little political isolation for the conferees.
Instead external participants such as the president, representatives of
governmental agencies, and interest groups have intense interest and impact on
the conference deliberations. “This is not a conference between the two houses,”
remarked Senator John Danforth (R. Mo) in 1988 about the omnibus trade
conference of the 100th Congress. “It’s a conference between Congress and the
administration.” Some conferences, in brief, operate in relative isolation’ others are
deeply immersed in politically volatile webs of interests and pressure.
– Longley & Oleszek 1989 – Bicameral Politics

6
The relentlessly open quality of congressional procedures is one of the
reasons Congress is among the least liked institutions, political or nonpolitical.
– Hibbing & Thierse-Morse 2004 – Stealth Democracy

6
It used to be that secrecy was seen as essential to good government,
especially when it came to cra ing legislation. Terrified of outside pressures, the
framers of the U.S. Constitution worked in strict privacy, boarding up the windows
of Independence Hall and stationing armed sentinels at the door. As Alexander
Hamilton later explained, “Had the deliberations been open while going on, the
clamors of faction would have prevented any satisfactory result.” James Madison
concurred, claiming, “No Constitution would ever have been adopted by the
convention if the debates had been public.” The Founding Fathers even wrote
opacity into the Constitution, permitting legislators to withhold publication of the
parts of proceedings that “may in their Judgment require Secrecy.”
– James D’Angelo & Brent Ranalli 2019
The Dark Side of Sunlight (Foreign Affairs Magazine)

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 6
Before the reforms, it was much more difficult to hold individual members
accountable for specific provisions of tax legislation. Instead, bills were collective,
privately forged committee products that were presented to the House in a take-it-
or-leave-it manner... With the congressional reforms the balance of power shi ed.
To retain their seats and to win House approval of committee bills, Ways and Means
members had to be more responsive to requests from constituents, organized
interests, and their House colleagues. These new pressures were intensified by the
sunlight of open meetings. Ways and Means members could now be held
accountable for their positions on every provision that made up a tax package. In
short, the Ways and Means Committee was easier to penetrate, particularly by
organized interests, and much less autonomous. In turn, the committee could no
longer provide cover for House members.
– Catherine Rudder 1989 – Fairness and the Revenue Committees

6
Reformers ought to steer clear of always trying to ensure more democracy,
more openness. I think the constant pressure for “more democracy” has had some
negative consequences. The openness in Congress has meant being open to
organized interests, not to a broad public. Opening up the the parties has just
made them more accountable to activist groups. Openness is not always the
solution. It’s the easiest normative rationale one can offer for reform proposals. But
in the real world it o en has negative consequences.
– Frances Lee 2018 – The Parties Are Dying

6
Ray Dennison, an AFL-CIO lobbyist who opposed the trade bill, said he always
prefers open markups and found the closed trade bill sessions particularly unfair.
– CQ Quarterly 1973 – Senate and House Open Up their Sessions

*NOTE: Dennison is a lobbyist who is explicitly calling for more transparency.


 6
The idea that more transparency in government is always an unalloyed good
is a dangerous populist illusion...The demand to see decisions being made is more
o en about giving reporters fodder for juicy stories or enabling groups to pressure
decision-makers than helping voters make decisions.
– Francis Fukuyama 2015 – The Limits of Transparency

7
Opening meetings to the public has meant opening meetings to everyone,
including lobbyists, who, it has been claimed, take an even greater part in writing
Ways and Means legislation than they did in the past...Thus, the open meetings
have made members more accountable to whoever cares to pay attention.
– Catherine Rudder 1977 – Committee Reform


 Senator Dale Bumpers 1999 NY Times 7

7
A er the 1976 Government in the Sunshine Act required that congressional
committee meetings be public, surveys of senators soon concluded that these
open meeting requirements were the largest single cause of a decline in the ability
to negotiate and to make politically difficult trade-offs.
– Richard Pildes 2014 – Romanticizing Democracy


 7
The silent majority is not going to be present at the open markups of the bills;
they are going to be too busy and too occupied otherwise. But if you have open
markup on bills...do you not think that the special interests will be there? The silent
majority will not be there, but the special interests will be well represented.
– Rep George Mahon 1970 – Donald Wolfensberger (Congress & the People)

7
Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, while supporting some means of unfiltered
public exposure of Congress to the public through television, called attention to
shortcomings in network coverage of committee hearings. “We all know that
conflict makes news,” he said. “We also know that a televised shouting match
usually concentrates more on the exchange of insults than the exchange of ideas.”
In fact, “a congressional investigation receives more attention when important
voices--but not necessarily significant questions--are raised.” Moreover, “the bulk
of our productive work in the Senate,” what Muskie called “the actual exercise of
legislating,” receives little attention from the media. In committees with open
markup sessions, “private interests have been well represented in the audience –
as lobbyists – while the public interest – in the form of journalists – has been
noticeably absent.” He concluded on this point that “a clash of opinion is innately
more newsworthy than the resolution of those differences.”
– Donald Wolfensberger 2000 – Congress & the People

7
Because this Government is Republican, it will not be pretended that it can
have no secrets…To discuss the secret transactions of the Government publicly,
was the ready way to sacrifice the public interest.
– Debates and Proceedings of US Congress 1798


 7
An action performed in public is more susceptible to influence by other
agents than an action performed in secret is. Therefore those with the most
resources at their disposal are in a better position to influence the behavior of
others if such behavior takes place in the open than if it is performed in secrecy. I
see no way of escaping that influence.
– Bernard Manin 2015 – Secrecy and Publicity

Harry Cooper – 2017 Politico 7


 7
There are, in short, more people than ever before watching Congress, and
fewer secrets that can be kept hidden. The work of Congress is more than ever
before a public enterprise, and information about what is happening, and why, is
readily available to those who know how to obtain it. It is precisely the very
openness of the process that makes Congress so susceptible to influence by
lobbyists.
– Bruce Wolpe 1990 – Lobbying Congress

7
Efforts to dampen corruption with transparency usually threaten to promote
it. The source of the problem is easy to explain. Corruption requires bargaining. By
sharing information, transparency lowers the transaction costs of corrupt
bargaining.
– Michael Gilbert 2018 – Transparency and Corruption

8
This openness presumably made Congress more accountable to the general
public. In some cases, however, the main beneficiaries have been organized
interest groups – which, unlike the general public, closely monitor legislative
activity and keep track of friends and enemies.
– Paul Quirk 1991 – Evaluating Congressional Reform

8
The effect of open committee meetings, although intended to bring
committee ties to organized groups into the “sunshine,” is more debatable. The
attentive audience for committee meetings is o en precisely those groups; and
indeed committees have defended private negotiations and closed sessions as
ways to reduce group pressure.
– Paul Quirk 1991 – Evaluating Congressional Reform


 8
REGULATING CONSTITUENCY PRESSURE: The most important threat to
effective deliberation in Congress in general is probably pressure from powerful
constituencies. On issues that are sufficiently salient, the pressure comes primarily
from the mass public. On other issues, it comes mainly from interest groups.
Congress has limited means to regulate those pressures, which are essential
features of a democratic political system. In any case constituency demands and
partisan electoral goals have also constrained efforts to do so.

Prior to 1970, much congressional activity was not readily observed by ordinary
citizens. Many committee meetings, including most bill-dra ing or "markup"
sessions, were closed to the public. Floor debate was not televised. Many
important floor votes were conducted as unrecorded voice votes, with the
presiding officer simply calling for the yeas and nays and judging which were
louder. The public learned only which side had won, not how their representatives
had voted. As Bessette points out, the closed arrangements had the advantage of
permitting members to deliberate with some autonomy.
– Paul Quirk & Sarah Binder 2005 – Institutions of American Democracy

8
Meetings occur behind closed doors so lawmakers can escape pressures from
lobbyists and reporters, who have made it more difficult for them to handle
business “in the sunshine.”
– Richard Cohen 1994 – Washington at Work: Back Rooms and Clean Air

*NOTE: This citation refers to the successful passage of the 1990 Clean Air
Amendments (the most powerful environmental legislation in the past 40 years),
which were brokered almost exclusively behind closed doors by Mitchell and
others expressly to avoid the pressure of lobbyists. Full citation can be found here.

8
Facing unprecedented exposure to public observation, members of Congress
are now more prone to take unyielding stands on behalf of attentive constituencies
(special interests) and to defer to uninformed prejudices of the general public.
– Paul Quirk 1991 – Evaluating Congressional Reform


 Sarah Binder 2015 - Downsides of Transparency (Order in the House) 8

“Would we have seen the emergence of these restrictive rules even without the rules changed in the 1970s?
Perhaps...But I think much of what we see in the House today, the roots lie in these reforms of the 70s, which
obviously were originally in the pursuit of greater transparency and greater accountability.”

8
‘Sunshine’ laws have opened committee hearings to the gaze of the public, or
more frequently in practice to lobbyists.
– Graham Wilson 1981 – Interest Groups in the United States

8
Contrary to the naive sirens of maximum democracy, greater transparency is
as much a problem for good governance as it is a solution.
– Bruce Cain 2014 – The Transparency Paradox

8
In the real world of American politics, interested individuals and
organizations, not average citizens, have the greater incentive and means to
monitor the government closely. This can open the door to obstruction and policy
distortion as it enables regulatory capture by interested parties who advocate
freely for their views without any countervailing public voice.
– Bruce Cain 2014 – The Transparency Paradox

 8
There continues to be a dearth of studies empirically testing the theoretical
claims of transparency advocates, even as legislation and institutional support for
their case accumulates exponentially.
– Amitai Etzioni 2010 – Is Transparency the Best Disinfectant?


 Ezra Klein – 2013 Washington Post 9

9
Professor Frances Lee of the University of Maryland political science
department said that certain practices that have been undertaken in pursuit of
transparency can impair legislative deliberation since they disproportionately
allow outside interest groups to influence decision makers and they incentivize
Members to focus on public-facing messaging rather than negotiating with
colleagues...Lee was not the only person to highlight the unintended consequences
that greater openness brings. Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) noted how
important civil rights legislation passed Congress due to closed-door negotiations.
“I’m not sure that Lyndon Johnson would have been able to get the civil rights bill
or the Voting Rights Act approved if the world was involved in hearing and viewing
his interactions, and the deal making…that took place to get that done,” he said.
– Mark Strand 2019 – Hearing on Legislative Transparency


 9
Because I can see exactly how you vote, you can easily sell your vote to me.
Enter anonymous voting, which made it impossible legally for me to be confident
about how you, the voter, votes. No doubt, you could promise me that you’ll vote
as I wish, but you could just as well promise the same thing to the other side. The
price I’d be willing to pay, then, for your vote is much, much less (discounted for the
possibility that you’ve also sold your vote to the other side). And by lowering the
price, this ingenious reform lowered the significance of vote buying [campaign
finance?] substantially.
– Lawrence Lessig 2011 – Republic Lost

9
Indeed, the push for more transparency is o en advocated by lobbyists
themselves, eager for legal clarity and happy to present themselves as fulfilling a
vital role in modern democracies through the information they provide to
policymakers.
– Harry Cooper 2017 – Politico

9
Both Madison and Hamilton, then, did not think secret sessions of the
national legislature antithetical to the spirit of republican government. Although
the government, they might have said with Lincoln, is of the people, by the people,
and for the people, it is a government in which the people do not directly
participate. The people, according to the First Amendment, have the right “to
petition the government for a redress of grievances,” but they do not have the right
to know about all the deliberations that take place in Congress. Although Article 1,
Section 3, of the Constitution requires each House to keep a journal of its
proceedings, it also allows that each House may leave out “such parts as may in
their judgment require secrecy…” The Founding Fathers did not extol secrecy, but
neither did they rule it out. And they probably would have had grave reservations
about the spate of laws enacted in the mid-1970s that make the American
government the most open government in history.
– Stephen Miller 1983 – Special Interest Groups in American Politics


 9
The supposition that transparency uniquely empowers regular folks is quaint
fantasy. By and large, those combing the public records and filing information
requests are not your neighbors. Generally, they are junior associates at big law
firms searching for some detail that can be used to challenge a federal decision
that is at odds with their client’s interests... The popular distrust of government
officials has taken a toll on a political system that requires the collaboration of
divergent in terests. It is time to dispel the simplistic notion that transparency in
government is an unmitigated good and recognize the role of privacy in nurturing
honesty, creativity, and collaboration.
– Jason Grumet 2014 – The Dark Side of Sunlight (City of Rivals)

9
Institutional systems characterized as open and accountable should exhibit
higher levels of direct lobbying and a broader range of inside lobbying tactics, as
policymakers in those systems are driven by the reelection motive to be receptive
to communications from advocates about the views of their constituents. Thus,
advocates in the United States are expected to display higher levels and a broader
range of inside lobbying tactics.

In addition, the role of democratic institutional design should also be perceived

within a polity by investigating inside lobbying across the primary political
institutions of the political system. Thus in the United States, the U.S. Congress, the
most open and accountable of U.S. institutions, should be the object of more
inside lobbying than executive agencies or the White House. In the European
Union, the Council, the most nontransparent and unaccountable of EU institutions,
should be the object of the least amount of inside lobbying.
– Christine Mahoney 2008 – Brussels vs. the Beltway

9
If transparency is not reduced to what it is, a means, it is a threat, so that
democracy has realized the dream of totalitarianism. The demand for excess
transparency is no longer the quintessence of democracy, but rather its direct
opposite.
– G. Carcassone 2001 – Le Trouble De La Transparence

 9
Long said open committee meetings would mean more pressure from
organized lobbies trying to force a decision in their direction...“There are times,” he
told the Senate, “when the Committee on Finance is going to have to close its
doors to protect the interests of the country and discharge its obligations. It is our
duty, to vote to hold a meeting behind closed doors when that becomes necessary
either to protect national secrets or to reduce the power of an organized group to
try to stampede the committee. The Senate should not make it any more
embarrassing and difficult than it needs to be to arrive at this result.”
– Finance Committee Chair, Russell Long 1973
– Senate, House Modify Secrecy Rules

9
“Every time action is taken to close the session,” said John O. Pastore (D R.I.),
ranking Democrat on the Commerce Committee, “it raises an atmosphere of
suspicion that the committee has something to hide. That is the thing that disturbs
me.” He said senators would be reluctant to close even those hearings which
should be closed and that classified information might be revealed. “When you tell
me you are mandating to open up these hearings to the public,” Pastore declared,
“I am afraid we are playing footsies with the security of this country.”
– Ranking Member on Commerce – John Pastore (D R.I.) 1973
– Senate, House Modify Secrecy Rules

1
The temptations of television are seductive, but they may also be destructive.
The risks are many and serious. Instead of informing our people, televised House
proceedings may confuse them. Instead of educating it may bore them and make
them impatient. Instead of polishing the image of the House, the consequences of
broadcasting may further tarnish it. Instead of maintaining the dignity of the
House, television may encourage circus antics. Instead of improving the legislative
process, television may degrade it. And instead of enhancing the democratic
process, television may corrode and cheapen it.
– Rep. Del Clawson 1976 – Congress and the People


 Bruce Cain 2016 – Debate “Is Government Too Open” 1

1
As for special interest representation, the nation’s capital is filled with
lobbying groups and associations. There are scores of industry associations, public
affairs lobbies, single-interest groups, and many other advocacy organizations.
Special interest groups are major policymaking players...Many interest groups also
are informally affiliated with one party or the other, and their demands for loyalty
make it difficult for lawmakers to compromise. Ironically, some of the sunshine
reforms of the 1970s had the unintended consequence of strengthening the
role of special interests.
– Walter Oleszek 2011 – Secrecy and Transparency


 1
Most committee staffers and MLAs agree that the closed markup in SASC
results in a more efficient and candid policymaking process. Without reporters or
lobbyists in the room, Senators are free to debate difficult decisions and make
deals without the pressures to posture or conform to narrow ideological or
parochial views. …The closed markup allows Senators with those concerns to
sometimes cra a deal with others on the committee that would have been
politically impossible if lobbyists or reporters were present. Compromise o en
requires some degree of anonymity, and certainly the closed markup in SASC is
testimony to that reality. [Many staffers] are highly skeptical about the benefits of
an open process. While increased transparency is certainly valued, many believe an
open process would undermine vigorous and frank debate, and also frustrate
compromise and bipartisanship.
– Colleen Shogan 2011 – The Senate’s Last Best Hope

1
A former SASC staff director explained, “Senate Armed Services has never had
an open markup, and I’m proud of that. …Why should we do it in the open? It
would wreck the seriousness of the purpose. Staff needs to give candid views to
Senators, and you can’t do that in open session. Governing in the sunshine
shouldn’t be applied to everything. In the House, open markup forces cutting deals
behind closed doors” (Interview with Arnold Punaro, 3/10/2011). Another
argument focuses on efficiency. Whereas the entire markup process is usually
completed in one week, there is general agreement that an open process would
extend markup considerably. One MLA remarked that the two-day full committee
markup could last for more than two weeks if it was opened to the public
(Interview with Senate staffer, 1/20/2011). Another staffer concurred, “The effect of
the closed session is that the lobbyists don’t know about the bill until it comes out.
Coming up with a deal is a lot harder when an amendment is made public and
circulates all over this town” (Interview with Senate staffer, 1/13/2011).
– Colleen Shogan 2011 – The Senate’s Last Best Hope


 1
These results demonstrate that individuals and groups interested in
increasing the likelihood that politicians identify and pass compromise deals need
to find a way to insulate the elected officials during the negotiation phase. [Our]
evidence indicates that politicians can and should be given some privacy during
the negotiation process so they can consider effective compromise solutions.
– Anderson, Butler, Harbridge-Yong 2018 – Closed-Door Compromise

1
The number of important changes affecting Congress over the last three
decades is remarkable. They include: the transformation of the U.S. Senate from an
encapsulated men's club, a "citadel" in the description of one of its observers, into
a publicity machine operated for the purpose of linking senators with national
interest groups and factions.
– Nelson Polsby 1982 – Contemporary Transformations of American Politics

1
Sinclair writes that the Senate has been transformed from a committee-
centered, member expertise dependent, inward looking, and relatively closed
institution that was characterized by an unequal distribution of influence and
constraining norms to an open, staff dependent, outward looking institution in
which influence is much more equally distributed and members are accorded very
wide latitude. Sinclair argues that as a result of these changes the Senate of today
can encounter great difficulty in making decisions. Nelson Polsby has called the
Senate a publicity machine operated for the purpose of linking senators with
national interest groups and factions.
– Al Kaltman 2017 – Leadership

1
Through skillful use of public arenas (transparency), a nonmember (lobbyist,
special interest) may be able to pressure committee members to take up an issue
they would rather ignore… Not only can nonmembers o en influence the shape of
legislation, they can o en influence committee agendas.
– Barbara Sinclair 1989 – Transformation of the US Senate

 1
The authors discuss the importance of closed-door negotiations for
successful legislative compromise. Using experimental data collected from state
legislators, the authors demonstrate that lawmakers expect private negotiations to
result in successful compromises more o en than public negotiations.
– Anderson, Butler, Harbridge-Yong 2018 – Closed-Door Compromise

1
In both studies, subjects compromised less when "performing" before an
audience of constituents than when no audience was present during negotiations.
– Daniel Druckman 1994 – Determinants of Compromising Behavior in
Negotiation

1
If you judge the committee’s work by the bottom line, they have a pretty good
case for closing. It’s hard to close loopholes when there are lobbyists in the room.
– McIntyre 1983 – Citizens for Tax Justice

1
Transparency o en imposes direct costs on successful deal making, public
attention increases the incentive of lawmakers to adhere to party messages, a step
rarely conducive to setting aside differences and negotiating a deal.
– Binder & Lee 2013 – Political Negotiation

1
A senator periodically receives a record showing the number of times, by
percentage, that he or she has voted with each of the other 99 senators. When I first
came to the Senate, there were Democrats mixed in with Republicans and vice
versa. Today, except for procedural votes, or what are o en called throwaways, it’s
rare for more than two or three senators to cross party lines on a vote. Nothing
could more starkly demonstrate the fog of partisanship that has enveloped the
Senate.
– Senator Dale Bumpers 1999 – How Sunshine Harmed Congress

 Justin Fox 2006 – Government Transparency and Policymaking 1

1
We argue that making lawmakers more accountable to the public by making
it easier to identify their policy choices can have negative consequences. Our
model suggests that when lawmakers expect their policy choices to be widely
publicized, for those lawmakers sufficiently concerned about reelection, the desire
to select policies that lead the public to believe they are unbiased will trump the
incentive to select those policies that are best for their constituents. Hence,
lawmakers who would do the right thing behind close doors may no longer do so
when policy is determined in the open.
– Justin Fox 2006 – Government Transparency and Policymaking 
 Justin Fox 2011 – Costly Transarency 1

1
While most of the [increases in transparency] Congress made during this
period were not in response to any great outpouring of public sentiment – more
than one observer has noted that “congressional reform has no constituency” -
they did have the support of various interest groups as well as of editorial writers
and columnists.
– Donald Wolfensburger 2000 – Dawning of the Sunshine Seventies


 1
The idea that Washington would work better if there were TV cameras
monitoring every conversation gets it exactly wrong. We don’t need smoke-filled
back rooms, but we must protect the private spaces where people with different
points of view are able to work through their disagreements. The lack of
opportunities for honest dialogue and creative give-and-take lies at the root of
today’s dysfunction.
– Senator Tom Daschle 2014 – City of Rivals

1
We’ve probably gone too far in the direction of transparency in a number of
government deliberative processes.
– Lee Drutman 2016 – Chaos of American Politics

1
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the desire for private
conversation – even among public officials… It’s time to let common sense reign
and let government personnel communicate with each other through the medium
of their choosing with a presumption of privacy.
– Matt Yglesias 2016 – Against Transparency

1
Secrecy is an important shield for conferees against pressures from outside.
– Pressman 1966 – Bicameral Politics (Longley & Oleszek)

1
Instead of waiting in uncomfortable corridors, lobbyists and reporters...now
wait in uncomfortable committee rooms, mostly small old ones in the Capitol
designed for private meetings.
– Clymer 1977 – Bicameral Politics (Longley & Oleszek)


 Cass R. Sunstein 2016 – Output Transparency vs. Input Transparency 1

1
The primary effect of opening committee meetings is that it gives lobbyists
more information, and thus more power. It makes lobbying—the art of influencing
government officials—a more effective, scientific discipline. It makes it harder for
representatives to shake off the cajoling of lobbyists with a friendly white lie. It
allows lobbyists to prove to their principals at the home office, with hard data, that
their efforts pay off, that investment in legislative influence can be profitable.
– Brent Ranalli 2017 – Sunshine Reforms and Transformation of Congressional
Lobbying

 1
The intimidation factor is alive and well on Capitol Hill, where most
members, while privately resenting the pressure, dutifully toe the Israeli line. If
voting were kept secret, I am confident that aid to Israel would have long ago been
heavily conditioned – if not terminated – in both chambers.
– Rep. Paul Findley 2003 – They Dare To Speak Out

1
The results demonstrate that the failure of previous research to analyze
interaction effects have led scholars to draw inadequate and misleading
conclusions about the link between transparency, democracy and
corruption...Fisher, Ury and Patton even claim that “a good case can be made for
changing Woodrow Wilson’s slogan ‘open covenants openly arrived at’ to ‘open
covenants privately arrived at’”, arguing that negotiators will produce wise
agreements more easily in private than in public.
– Catharina Lindstedt & Daniel Naurin 2005 – Transparency and Corruption

1
Is it possible that opaque ‘backstage’ areas of politics may in fact, under
some circumstances, be more civil in the deliberative sense—more characterised
by arguing with reference to public interests and ideals and less affected by self-
interested bargaining and pressure politics—than the public ‘frontstage’? At the
least, Joerges and Neyer’s and Eliasoph’s findings demonstrate the prevailing
ambiguity about the effects of transparency and publicity on political behaviour.
– Daniel Naurin 2007 – Deliberation Behind Closed Doors

1
Arguments against more transparency while merited in a few instances are
o en not only limited in application, but fundamentally flawed.
– Vishwanath & Kaufmann 1999 – Toward Transparency


 1
The government-in-the-sunshine movement may have had its greatest effect
on deliberation in the committee markup stage. When these sessions were secret,
congressmen were not strictly accountable for their opinions and actions on the
details of a legislative proposal. They had little reason to fear offending a powerful
constituency or interest group if they failed to back their requests in every respect.
Now these same groups are actually present during the line-by-line reworking of
the bill. They can monitor the congressman’s actions on every vital point. It is hard
to imagine how any truly deliberative process – of openness to information and
argument, of reasoned give and take, and of education on the substance of policy –
can occur in such an environment.
– Joseph Bessette 1982 – Is Congress A Deliberative Body?

Norman Ornstein 1973 – What Makes Congress Run? 1


 1
Despite the general perception that lobbyists prefer opacity with regards to
the disclosure of their activities, the OECD’s surveys show that the majority of
surveyed lobbyists support mandatory disclosure of information.
– OECD 2013 – Transparency and Integrity

1
The use of electronic voting in the House has also made it easier for interest
groups to follow and grade members. The most famous of these scores are
produced by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the American
Conservative Union (ACU), but almost all interest groups create some kind of
‘score’ that shows how closely member votes align with the group’s position. These
scores are invaluable for group members, who can use them when contacting their
representatives or when deciding whether to support (finance) the incumbent in
future elections (or funding the campaign of their competitor)...The adoption of
electronic voting provided the majority leadership with powerful tools with which
to influence legislative outcomes.
– Jacob Straus 2012 – The Rise of Roll Call Votes

1
Once lobbyists knew your every vote, they used it as ammunition...America is
increasingly embracing a simple-minded populism that values popularity and
openness as the key measures of legitimacy. This ideology has necessitated the
destruction of old institutions, the undermining of traditional authority, and the
triumph of organized interest groups, all in the name of  “the people.”
– Fareed Zakaria 2003 – Future of Freedom


 1
To reduce the dominating and distracting effect that the press, home
audiences, and third parties (lobbyists) may have, it is useful to establish private
and confidential means of communicating with the other side. You can also
improve communication by limiting the size of the group meeting. In the
negotiations over the city of Trieste in 1954, for example, little progress was made
in the talks among Yugoslavia, Britain, and the United States until the three
principal negotiators abandoned their large delegations and started meeting alone
and informally in a private house. A good case can be made for changing Woodrow
Wilson's appealing slogan “Open covenants openly arrived at” to “Open covenants
privately arrived at.” No matter how many people are involved in a negotiation,
important decisions are typically made when no more than two people are in the
room.
– Roger Fisher & William Ury 1987 – Getting to Yes

*NOTE: Harvard negotiation experts Fisher and Ury mention Trieste, but other salient and
important examples abound such as Kennedy’s private communications with Khrushchev
which averted nuclear war and Mitchell’s closed door sessions which helped resolve the
situation in Northern Ireland. In both cases it appears that secrecy was essential to the
peaceful negotiation. These ideas are covered in an important paper by Finel titled ‘The
Surprising Logic of Transparency.’

1
Contributions are offered and accepted, solicited and anted up, when
legislation is being dra ed, considered in committee, voted on on the floor, or
considered for repeal.
– Amitai Etzioni 1998 – Capital Corruption


 World Bank Report – Litvack 2011 / Blair 2000 1

1
Everyone knows that laws which provide a secret ballot have deprived the
aristocracy of all its influence.
– Cicero 50 BC – De Legibus

1
Polarization is a cost of many of these good government reforms. It is almost
an intended cost if you think about it... Transparency, open meetings, bans on
earmarks, and weaker party machines make compromise more difficult.
– Nathaniel Persily 2014 – Would Stronger Parties Mean Less Polarization?


 1
This secret voting has an ancient history. In Britain in the 17th century, the
House of Commons evolved it as a device to shield individual members from
intimidation by King James I and King Charles I. When a difficult decision had to be
taken, the House simply became a committee, the Speaker was excluded as a
probable royal spy, and a vote was taken with no record kept. When the House of
Representatives was organized in 1789, it took over this practice.
– William Shannon 1970 – The House Decides to Stop Being So Secretive

1
Information is the currency of Capital Hill, not dollars and not friends.
– Schoonmaker (Lobbyist) 1993 – It’s What Lobbyists Know

1
Government transparency is no cure-all and does not always have positive
outcomes.
– Cucciniello et al 2017 – 25 Years of Transparency Research

1
The historic debate on the advantages and disadvantages of electronic voting
in many ways hinged on transparency. Throughout the early debate in the 1914
and 1916 Congresses, members were concerned about the transparency of their
votes and the consequences of public and lobbyist access to voting information
prior to publication in the Congressional Record. Members were also concerned
about lobbying by other members during votes, whether votes could be changed
once they were cast but before voting time expired, and if changes would be
published in the record...(Now) party leadership (uses) voting as a tactic to require
other members to state a position on the record.
– Straus 2012 – The Rise of Roll Call Votes

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Le secret est l'arme de la négociation.
– François de Callières 1716 – Fin du secret diplomatique?

NOTE: We found this quote in an excellent article by P. Sharp "Secret Diplomacy of Late Moderns" the
following is from his piece "The classic texts are liberally sprinkled with expressions to the effect that
secrecy is indispensable to the conduct of diplomatic relations. Callieres begins his discussion of
communications between the ambassador and his sovereign with the following, 'Secrecy, being the very
life of negotiations', or in some translations, 'Secrecy is the very soul of diplomacy' (Callieres 1983
[1715): 164; Freeman 1997: 264)."

1
Secrecy tends to induce bargaining and publicity to induce arguing, secrecy
also improves the quality of whatever arguing that does take place behind closed
doors.
– Jon Elster 2008 – Optimal Design of Constituent Assemblies

1
If the debates are public, perhaps because the need for diversity requires a
large assembly that will not be able to maintain secrecy, one might in fact impose
secret voting both to eliminate interest-based logrolling and to make the delegates
unafraid of voting the wrong way on popular proposals. -- To exclude audience
pressure that might bring delegates under the sway of emotion (vanity or fear), the
assembly should debate in secret or, alternatively, vote in secret.
– Jon Elster 2008 – Optimal Design of Constituent Assemblies

1
Roll-call votes provide an obvious means by which party leaders can monitor
compliance with their voting instructions...Legislative parties may use roll-call
votes specifically to discipline their members. Roll-call votes allow legislative party
leaders to monitor their members’ behavior, which is essential for accurately
doling out reward or punishment.
– Carrubba, Gabel & Hug 2008 – Legislative Voting Behavior

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 Timmer 2017 – Ars Technica 1

1
We investigate…anti-corruption strategies (transparency and leader
investment in the public good) and cultural background…These results suggest
that a more nuanced approach to corruption is needed and that proposed
panaceas, such as transparency, may actually be harmful in some contexts.
– Muthukrishna & Francois 2017 – Nature Magazine
How Anti-Corruption Strategies May Backfire

1
No Constitution would ever have been adopted by the convention if the
debates had been public.
– James Madison 1830 – The Public Intellectual (full quote below)

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James Madison 1830 1

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It was...best for the convention for forming the Constitution to sit with closed
doors, because opinions were so various and at first so crude that it was necessary
they should be long debated before any uniform system of opinion could be
formed. Meantime the minds of the members were changing, and much was to be
gained by a yielding and accommodating spirit. Had the members committed
themselves publicly at first, they would have a erwards supposed consistency
required them to maintain their ground, whereas by secret discussion no man felt
himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their
propriety and truth, and was open to the force of argument.
– James Madison 1830

1
Forcing the publication of votes in an institutional setting that relies on
diplomatic practices can have deleterious effects on accountability: In some cases,
the publication of votes might operate as a window-dressing device, prompting the
public belief that ministers are accountable since they publish their votes, while
real monitoring of the decision makers’ stances is not possible.
– Novak 2015 – Secrecy and Publicity

1
As a final example, I shall cite the argument made by James D’Angelo that the
combination of public voting in Congress and huge private contributions to
election campaigns has undermined American democracy, by enabling lobbyists to
verify that a representative they have funded votes the way they want.
– Elster 2015 – Secrecy and Publicity

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In addition to the democratic goods of the right to know and accountability,
transparency in process has recently been advanced as a means to shore up citizen
trust in government. Yet transparency may not have this effect. Several studies find
no effects of transparency on trust and procedure acceptance. In one recent study,
transparency in process did not produce increments of legitimacy significantly
greater than transparency in rationale. The authors conclude that “a relatively
modest reform focusing on transparency in rationale – such as a reason-giving
requirement – may contribute to similar degrees of added legitimacy as more far-
reaching transparency in process measures. Decision makers may improve the
legitimacy of the procedure by simply outlining carefully a erward the reasons for
the decisions taken behind closed doors.”
– Warren & Mansbridge 2013 (citing De Fine Licht)
– Political Negotiation

1
Increased transparency may actually make people less trusting than under
conditions of less or no transparency. Full public insight into the decision-making
process involves potential efficiency costs such as decision makers becoming less
willing to agree on compromises, and it increases the risk that people become
disappointed regarding the conditions under which decision making takes place.
– Jenny de Fine Licht 2014
– Magic Wand or Pandora´s Box? How transparency affects public perceptions
of legitimacy

1
Too much transparency might produce gridlock instead of policy success.
– Oleszek 2011 – Lawmaking

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 Skarin 2014 – Why Transparency Gives Power To Wrong People 1

1
The duty to deliberate well may o en be inconsistent with attempts to
conduct policy deliberations on the plane of public opinion.
– Bessette 1994 – Mild Voice of Reason

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The question arises (whether)...transparency is either conducive to more
corruption or, at least, to corruption taking forms that are more detrimental to
efficiency or equity.
– Breton 2007 – The Economics of Transparency in Politics

Grumet 2014 – The Dark Side of Sunlight (pdf 2.5MBs) 1

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Take for instance, the so-called “sunshine” laws which are being passed at
every level of government, and against which no public figure seems bold enough
to protest. They require that practically all meetings of all official bodies be open to
public view. This sounds good, but in actuality it is utterly absurd. It’s no way to run
anything, whether it be a school board, a university department, a trade union or a
government agency. It penalizes candor and compromise and rewards aggressive
“grandstanding.” Does anyone really believe that the Ford Motor Company and the
United Automobile Worker could have reached an agreement if their negotiations
were transmitted live on television? Or even if minutes of the meetings were kept?
Similarly, the only reason Congress can function is because the committee system
provides private (i.e., “secret”) occasions for negotiation that are distinct from the
public forum where opinions are sharply expressed and debated.

It is easy to predict that these “sunshine” laws will be regularly evaded, even by the
legislative bodies that enacted them. But they will be a perpetual nuisance, will
provide opportunities for mischievous intervention by various publicity-hunting
busybodies and, above all, will have exactly the opposite effect from that intended;
instead of increasing public respect for the laws or the land, they will simply
provide another instance of frequent nonobservance of these laws by public
officials at all levels.
– Irving Kristol 1976 – Post-Watergate Morality

1
A er 1971 it became relatively easy to demand a recorded vote on
amendments... Such rules changes have complicated the lives of members and
reinforced some of the more troubling aspects of the permanent campaign...
Opposition researchers pore over members’ voting records in an attempt to find a
vote contrary to – or a vote that can be (mis)construed as contrary to – the
preferences of their constituents. Every vote a member casts must be considered a
potential campaign issue. Indeed, some bills and amendments are offered only as
a vehicle for forcing a vote that will provide a campaign issue.
– Norman Ornstein & Thomas Mann 2000 – Permanent Campaign

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Norman Ornstein & Thomas Mann 2000 - The Permanent Campaign 1

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It would be too difficult to put together a fiscally responsible bill if special
interests could record how every member voted on every amendment. The
temptation to vote yes on everything would be too great.
– Rep. Hatcher 1991 – CQ Quarterly - Behind Closed Doors

1
You said that what people want is to be included...And I’m fascinated by the
drop in confidence across institutions. And one thing I see when I look at that
polling is that the more open the institution has become, the more people actually
are included in the institutions workings – things like Congress, the Presidency,
increasingly all facets of American life have become more transparent – the more
[the public’s confidence has] dropped. And then the more cloistered [the
institution] is – the Supreme Court, the Army – the more it sort of works on the side,
on its own, the more it has sustained trust. There seems to me to be a tension in
American life right now, where we o en want the institutions that govern us, that
help shape the world we're a part of, to be more open to us. But when we get more
into them, we don’t like it as much.
– Ezra Klein 1997 – Is Mitch Landrieu the “White, Southern Anti-Trump”?

1
Suffice it to say that there appears to be a fairly widespread consensus that
the Sunshine Act is not achieving its principal – and obviously salutary – goal of
enhancing public knowledge and understanding of agency decision-making.
Instead, there is a considerable body of evidence in the academic literature,
confirmed by the testimony of several agency officials, that the Act’s “open
meeting” requirement curtails meaningful collective deliberation and substantive
exchange of ideas among agency members. Rather than actual collective
deliberation in public, agency members o en use the open meeting merely to
announce and explain their positions.
– Randolph May 1997 – Reforming the Sunshine Act

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Openness is now regarded as one of the factors that has contributed to the
seizing-up of democratic systems.
– Alisdair Roberts 2014 – Making Transparency Policies Work: The Critical Role
of Trusted Intermediaries

1
Concern that providing initial deliberative views publicly, without sufficient
thought and information, may harm the public interest by irresponsibly
introducing uncertainty or confusion to industry or the general public; a desire on
the part of members to speak with a uniform voice on matters of particular
importance or to develop negotiating strategies which might be thwarted if
debated publicly; reluctance of an agency member to embarrass another agency
member, or to embarrass himself, through inadvertent, argumentative, or
exaggerated statements; concern that an agency member's statements may be
used against the agency in subsequent litigation, or misinterpreted or
misunderstood by the public or the press, as for example, when the agency
member is testing a position by "playing devil's advocate" or merely "thinking out
loud"; and concerns that a member's statements may affect financial markets.
– Special Committee Report 1997 – Reforming the Sunshine Act

1
As recently as the early 1970s, congressional committees could easily retreat
behind closed doors and members could vote on many bills anonymously, with
only the final tallies reported. Federal advisory committees, too, could meet off the
record. But...smoke-filled rooms, whatever their disadvantages, were good for
brokering complex compromises in which nothing was settled until everything was
settled; once gone, they turned out to be difficult to replace. In public, interest
groups and grandstanding politicians can tear apart a compromise before it is
halfway settled.
– Jonathan Rauch 2016 – How Politics Went Insane

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Alexander Hamilton 1792 1

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There isn’t much hard evidence that transparency reliably improves real-
world decision-making or makes the public happier, and some evidence points to
ill effects. One recent study finds that, in developing countries, transparency makes
the public more fatalistic about corruption rather than stimulating outrage and
action; the same dynamic of cynicism and numbness may apply in the United
States, especially when transparency is coupled with paralysis. The public sees
more of the sausage-making while getting less sausage. Ray La Raja finds that
disclosure rules seem to induce small political donors to halve their giving. The
point is not that sunshine rules and disclosure laws are always bad or even to deny
that up to a point they are a public good in and of themselves; it is only that they
can be counterproductive and that reformers’ dogmatic and o en moralistic
commitment to them needs a reality check.
– Jonathan Rauch 2016 – How Back Room Deals Can Strengthen Democracy

1
Transparency o en exacerbates crises. Specifically, it seems to have the
following effects: First, the media – a major factor in transmitting information
made available by transparency – may have an incentive to pay more attention to
belligerent statements than more subtle, conciliatory signals [and]… transparency
may actually undermine behind-the-scenes efforts at negotiated settlements.
[And]… a lack of transparency may actually help states avoid conflict.
– Finel & Lord 1999 – The Surprising Logic of Transparency

1
Consider the record of open diplomacy. It presents one salient lesson –
especially since the close of World War II: it doesn’t work. Under the conditions of
open diplomacy in the various conferences that have been held between the
representatives of East and West, the Russians could not be anything but
intransigent.
– Drew Middleton 1955 – Open Covenants Unopenly Arrived At

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The “C-SPAN Effect” can encourage political posturing over genuine debate
and a search for solutions. Using the C-SPAN model, more and more state and local
governments are making more and more public hearings and meetings available
over the public airwaves or over the Internet. Inviting this kind of public scrutiny
would certainly seem to promote accountability. But it also can promote
demagoguery over problem-solving, and it increases the chance that hearings or
legislative sessions will devolve into partisan speechmaking. I can testify
(anecdotally, to be sure) from my five years as a congressional staffer that there is a
marked difference between the behavior of members of Congress in hearings
depending on whether the cameras are on or not.
– Philip Joyce 2015 – The Dark Side of Government in the Sunshine

1
Transparency is seen as exacerbating crises by overwhelming diplomatic
signals with the “noise” of domestic politics and confusing opponents about which
domestic voices are authoritative expressions of state policy. The authors conclude
that, surprisingly, transparency makes conflicts worse more o en than not – a
conclusion that casts doubt on one possible explanation of the democratic peace.
– Finel & Lord 1999 – The Surprising Logic of Transparency

1
Is American government too open? The short answer is yes in many
instances. Determining the right amount of democratic transparency is surprisingly
complicated, because public officials must govern effectively, not simply in the
most democratically pure way. When we make naïve assumptions about citizen
capacity, democratic opportunities to observe and participate can be captured by
highly motivated and well-resourced interest groups and individuals.
– Bruce Cain (Stanford) 2016 – Is our Government too Open?

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 CQ Quarterly – Calmes 1987 – Few Complaints as Doors are Closed 1

1
Because of the adoption of rules changes governing voting on the floor, the
number of recorded roll call votes each year roughly quadrupled. Members felt
more and more harassed by various pressures of office, including less discretionary
time, more pressure from single issue interest groups, more clamor for
constituency service, more need to raise campaign money, and more
subcommittee assignments that demanded their attention.
– Kingdon 1989 – Congressmen’s Voting Decisions

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The impetus toward opening up the legislative process by such measures as
recorded teller voting, open committee markup sessions, and less frequent closed
rules may have increased the degree to which congressmen take constituents into
account. But following from our earlier discussion of constituency elites, because
the constituents who are paying attention are o en the organized interests, these
procedural changes may also have resulted in more attention to narrow interests,
more parochial voting, and less ability or willingness to structure the legislative
situation to look a er collective interests. Stripping legislators of the ability to
conceal votes may have increased their responsiveness to constituents at the same
time that it has decreased their ability to rise above narrow or parochial
constituency interests.
– Kingdon 1989 – Congressmen’s Voting Decisions

1
The infrequency of votes on which congressmen are recorded aye or nay was
another feature of the parliamentary situation used to get off the hook, at least in
the late 1960s. If the vote is not recorded, then the congressman is able to miss the
vote or even to vote contrary to the way he votes on the record. One metropolitan
congressman told me of his actions on the Whitten amendment to restrict HEW
desegregation guidelines:

The bussing thing was hard. Bussing has created a lot of trouble in my city. People
are mad about It. Damn good thing it wasn’t a roll call vote. I Just didn’t vote on
the Whitten amendment, I sat it out. (Question: What if it had been on the record?)
That would have been a very tough decision. I don’t know what I would have done.
But a nonrecord vote made it easy for me.
– Kingdon 1989 – Congressmen’s Voting Decisions

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Because the members of the United States House of Representatives vote
without a secret ballot, it does not come as a surprise that those seeking political
support, both from within the House and elsewhere, make direct contact with
members of congress, who hold the power to cast votes on pressing political
issues… The concept of “buying a vote” is an extremely arbitrary idea, and thus,
there is really no way to deter people entirely from becoming involved in these
actions, which are o en viewed with contempt. “Buying a vote” in congress does
not necessarily mean that money is being directly exchanged between the hands of
lobbyists and congressmen, but can really take on many different forms. Although
members of congress would not voluntarily admit to the fact that their votes may
be influenced by factors other than the opinions of their constituents, when
provided with opportunities by influential lobbyists, who can ultimately see which
congressmen voted “Yea” or “Nay,” they may find themselves struggling to ignore
such appealing bribes.
– Greenberg 2013 – Caught up in Corruption

1
Perhaps most jarring to modern minds was the rule providing “That no thing
spoken in the House be printed, or otherwise published, or communicated without
leave.” Like the intent of the resolutions rejecting individual roll call votes and
permitting revotes, the secrecy rule was designed both to allow members to speak
freely without fear of outside recrimination and to allay fears that might be spread
should rumors be circulated on the basis of partial information.
– Vile 2005 – The Constitutional Convention

1
Concerned about how key negotiations are being pushed into the shadows,
transparency campaigners and corporate lobbyists have formed an unlikely
coalition in response.
– Cooper 2016 – Politico

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The US has been the dominant country in the international system for some
time. It has pursued a strategy of primacy in world politics since the 1940s, and its
transparency policy is part of its long-term objective to forge and maintain a
favorable international order. In effect, the aspiration behind America's support for
greater transparency abroad is about maintaining an imbalance of power among
the countries of the world, with America on top.
– James Marquardt 2011 – Transparency and American Primacy in World Politics

1
The consensus view of transparency is incomplete and, therefore, faulty
because it represents transparency as a mechanism to transcend - and perhaps,
once and for all, vanquish - power politics. Yet transparency can also be
represented as part and parcel of power politics such that what it means, how it
works, and the outcomes associated with it, for instance, are very much a function
of the power dynamics that characterize world politics. That transparency is very
much wrapped up with and therefore inseparable from power politics escapes
serious attention.
– James Marquardt 2011 – Transparency and American Primacy in World Politics

1
America’s transparency initiatives and the resistance of others to them have
exacerbated tensions and exaggerated each side’s security dilemma, thereby
feeding into a spiral of hostility from which there is no easy exit.
– James Marquardt 2011 – Transparency and American Primacy in World Politics

1
The purpose of this book is to make the case for the inseparability of
transparency and power...Transparency in international politics and American
foreign policy is first and foremost a formation of power, which is most acutely
evident in transparency’s surveillance function. Although it is represented by
American policy elites as a liberal value, America’s efforts to institutionalize
transparency function principally as a mechanism to keep a close eye on and
discipline rivals.
– James Marquardt 2011 – Transparency and American Primacy in World Politics 
 1
Public officials routinely affirm their commitment to greater transparency in
government and lament how the lack of it inhibits cooperation and generates fear
and suspicion. Yet the reality is that their calls for greater transparency are
politically motivated.
– James Marquardt 2011 – Transparency and American Primacy in World Politics

1
In writing a book skeptical of America’s pursuit of increased transparency in
world politics, Marquardt injects needed arguments into debates and policies
where far too many assume that transparency is an unalloyed good. This book
shows how the United States has used transparency for strategic purposes, and not
just for mutually beneficial agreements between states. Thus, the United States
o en encounters resistance to its almost uniformly pro-transparency policies.
– Dan Lindley (Notre Dame) 2011 – University of Notre Dame

1
Tip O’Neill launched internal live television of the House floor using House
camera crews in March, 1977, and two years later gave the public access through C-
SPAN. The Senate followed in 1986 using its own camera crews...We staff got used
to having the backs of our heads on TV, and we cracked jokes about those staff who
seemed to cross behind the chair too many times just to be seen from the front. I
also started attending more meetings behind closed doors to reach agreements
that would be reenacted before the cameras the next day. It’s a lot more work to do
everything twice, and sometimes the reenactment on camera didn’t go according
to the script, so the chair would hastily recess to repair the damage...I object to
televising every utterance every minute of every closed door meeting because the
meeting will be impaired...It may be a futile plea, but.. human beings need
interaction to try out ideas and to gage support without being crucified for trying
something that wasn’t adopted anyway. The more scrutiny beyond a reasonable
amount, the less useful business gets done.
– House Staff Pete Davis 2010 – Cameras and Congress (Ezra Klein)

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 James D’Angelo 2016 – Twitter 1

1
State open meetings laws are preventing local officials from engaging
citizens online for fear of inadvertently having what would be legally considered a
meeting that would not meet other requirements such as public notice and public
access. At the federal level, the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act is preventing
the exchange of knowledge between the government and private sector. The
purpose of the law was to prevent federal agencies from having back-room
consultations with corporate executives and other entrenched sources, but the
requirements for obtaining public input have grown so complex under the act that
today the law is probably preventing federal agencies from getting the best
knowledge.
– Josh Tauberer 2014 – Unintended Consequences of Transparency

1
There are still some cases where closed mark-ups are better. We wouldn’t
have had 150 amendments to the energy bill if the lobbyists hadn’t been there –
we'd only have had 10 or 15.
– Rep Harley Staggers (D-WV) 1973 – Senate and House Open Up their Sessions

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Opponents of the (transparency) rule warned that it would encourage
members to show off for the press and allow lobbyists to intrude on
deliberations...One staff member said the open mark-up sessions slowed the
committee’s work when it was dealing with controversial legislation, because
members became “more vocal” for the benefit of lobbyists – and for reporters who
might quote them in the next day's papers. Lobbyists had been known to hand
members notes with suggested amendments, he said, and “sometimes you even
had applause and the chair had to bang for order.”
– CQ Quarterly 1973 – Senate and House Open Up their Sessions

1
Interested parties, not the general public, monitor the public sessions of
agencies in order to influence outcomes.
– Bruce Cain (Stanford) 2016 – Is our Government too Open?

1
The hubris that as we get more educated and we know more we can handle
more government responsibility, and when we fail we make possible the kind of
polarization, the kind of capture by special interest, the capture by the most
partisan of our society.
– Bruce Cain (Stanford) 2016 – Stanford talk: “Is our Government too Open?”

1
Contrary to the naive sirens of maximum democracy, greater transparency is
as much a problem for good governance as it is a solution.
– Bruce Cain (Stanford) 2016 – Stanford talk: “Is our Government too Open?”

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Today, the injunction of transparency has interfered in the unanimous
conception of Western democracy, so that power and the decisions adopted by its
holders are expected to become more and more important. As pointed out by G.
Carcassonne, “it is by their level of transparency that the institutions will be judged
above all, the performance and other conditions becoming only seconds. Only the
fully transparent decision process will be considered satisfactory. What does it
matter if he/she proves to be incapable of producing the slightest decision or
produces only mediocre ones?” And the Carcassone warns: “If transparency is not
reduced to what it is, a means, it is a threat, so that democracy has realized the
dream of totalitarianism. The demand for excess transparency is no longer the
quintessence of democracy, but rather its direct opposite”
– Chloé Mathieu 2017 – Émergence du mythe de la transparence, lobbying et
responsabilité des élus

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 Gordon Wood 2003 – Founding Fathers and Public Opinion 1

2
Transparency is no longer primarily a vehicle of civil society, but is fueled and
ruled by markets and states.
– Arthur P.J. Mol 2014 – The Lost Innocence of Transparency in Environmental
Politics

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Markets and states jostle to capture transparency arrangements for their own
diverse ends, which are not necessarily aligned with assumed normative linkages
between transparency, democracy and participation, as well as environmental
reform...Transparency has “lost its innocence” as an arbiter of democratic and
environmental gains.
– Arthur P.J. Mol 2014 – The Lost Innocence of Transparency in Environmental
Politics

2
We focus on the dynamics of representation that emerged out of the 1970
Legislative Reorganization Act. On balance these moves toward transparency have
had tremendously negative consequences. Consistent with the theory, increases in
transparency were followed by increased narrow-interest lobbying, wasteful and
pernicious legislative gamesmanship, increased partisanship, and more.
– David King (Harvard) 2017 – MPSA submission abstract

2
Committee deliberations were gradually opened up to public view, thus
distributing information to all interested parties and facilitating the work of
senator-interest group alliances...An increasing number of decisions were pushed
to the Senate floor-resulting in more roll calls, more floor amendments offered and
passed by noncommittee members and junior members (Sinclair 1985). While the
committees certainly retained the larger share of influence, the balance between
the committee rooms and the floor as arenas of decision making changed
markedly... A major indicator of the changed balance was the commonplace
exercise of the cherished senatorial right to talk-reflected in more “extended
debate” on more subjects, more filibusters and threats of filibusters, and more
cloture votes as efforts to cut off debate (Sinclair 1985). What was once regarded by
most senators as an ultimate right to be invoked sparingly for the good of the
community became an everyday weapon in the fight to gain a temporary
advantage over one’s colleagues.
– Richard Fenno 1989 – The Senate through the Looking Glass - The Debate over
Television

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(By opening up the Senate to television) we are no doubt making the most far
reaching change here that has been made in a long long time with reference to the
possibility of the practices on this floor ... we are just opening up a Pandora’s box,
and we can very easily carry on all the traditions and needs of the place without
this.
– Senator John Stennis 1982 – Congressional Record, 3 Feb. 347

2
A trade-off between transparency and effectiveness of parliamentary
legislative activity does exist: a sort of ‘transparency trap’ for legislatures, having
its main point of reference in the impairment of legislative committees’ decision-
making capacity. Indeed, increased levels of transparency favor an institutional
move towards assigning an overarching importance to the most sensational
declarations and to populist tones, which can have an immediate echo in the
media. Such a move, however, needs to fit in with the activity of bodies such as
legislative committees, specialized by subject matter, in charge of dra ing or
amending legislative acts, o en dealing with highly technical issues and within
which compromises and negotiations are essential.
– Cristina Fasone & Nicola Lupo 2015 – Transparency vs. Informality in
Legislative Committees

2
The article argues that increasing levels of transparency can impair
committees’ lawmaking performance, so also undermining the lawmaking ability
of their legislatures. In three very different legislatures (the US House of
Representatives, the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the European Parliament),
both in institutional architecture and committees’ legislative powers, the growing
transparency of their legislative activity has caused a shi ing of the legislative
decision-making away from committees or, even, outside the legislature.
– Cristina Fasone & Nicola Lupo 2015 – Transparency vs. Informality in
Legislative Committees

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As long as it is also believed that representatives should exercise a degree of
independent judgement, then transparency can also have costs. I have argued that
recent discussions of transparency in government have o en overlooked this fact...
With regard to polarization, while one might think that the institutional changes of
the past forty years to promote openness in government should logically have
reduced opinion polarization, the theoretical model presented here suggests why
they may have actually had the opposite effect.
– David Stasavage 2006 – Polarization and Publicity

2
Though openness in government has obvious benefits, recent scholarship
has devoted less attention to the possibility that it might also have costs. I use a
formal framework to investigate the effect of public versus private decision making
on opinion polarization. Existing work emphasizes that public debate helps to
reduce polarization and promote consensus, but I argue that when debate takes
place between representatives the opposite may be true.
– David Stasavage 2006 – Polarization and Publicity

2
Others have made attempts to discredit what is described as “secret
diplomacy,” without reflecting that negotiation, if it is to be successful, cannot be
carried oon upon the housetops...Nothing is to be gained by taking the world
prematurely in the confidence of governments in regards to matters of high policy.
– Satow 2011 – A Guide to Diplomatic Practice

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 2
Rhode Island’s Claiborne Pell feared that “the presence of television will lead
to more, longer, and less relevant speeches, to more posturing by Senators and to
even less useful debate and efficient legislating than we have today.”… Russell
Long from Louisiana also argued against the proposal, claiming that senators
would posture in front of the cameras and that television would attract senators to
the chamber floor when they should be doing the important work in committee
meetings. Others feared that some senators, in an effort to compete with their
House colleagues, would enlist the services of elocution coaches and even makeup
experts. William Proxmire from Wisconsin, another opponent of televised
proceedings argued that television would make if harder for Senators to reach
compromises in private because “senators will find that the positions they took in
their opening statements have been engraved in film.” “Television thrives on the
dramatic,” Proxmire said, and “any additional incentives to confrontation can only
mean more argument – and probably worse legislation.”
– Frost 2017 – Classified - History of Secrecy

2
Most important — and completely ignored by the champions of transparency
— is the fact that even the most conscientious citizens, dedicated to following
public affairs, have but one vote to weigh in on myriad issues. Most of the time,
citizens cannot vote up or down any specific program. Exceptions include some
local or state initiatives, such as bonds for schools or referenda on social issues like
gay marriage. However, most of the time, especially at the national level, voters
cannot be in favor of, say, much more funding for climate change, only a little more
funding for ocean exploration, and less funding for bombers (or any such other
combination). Rather, all they can do is vote up or down their representative, who,
in turn, votes on many scores of programs.
– Etzioni 2014 – Atlantic – Transparency is Overrated


 2
Since the markup session involves the refinement of language, resolving
conflict on concepts, and differences of opinion on the ultimate intent of a bill
under consideration, the markup sessions are usually closed to the general public
and to lobbyists. This has caused some consternation among lobbyists, since they
think that the “give and take” inherent in these sessions should be subject to
public scrutiny and to their influence...[But] those not familiar with the inner
workings of the legislative process o en misinterpret the markup sessions as
“closed” sessions in the sense of secret deliberations. All members of Congress
know that the markup session is deliberation in its finest form.
– Curtis & Westerfield 1992 – Congressional Intent

2
Almost everyone connected with the process agrees the legislation being
written would be even more riddled with gi s to special interests if it were being
done in public. Supporters of closed sessions argue that it speeds the process since
members don’t feel as much need to posture on issues for an audience and that it
provides protection from lobbyists for special interests.
– Donosky 1985 – Tax Reform Behind Closed Doors


 2
With the media, ordinary citizens, and campaign contributors watching, they
must take care to protect their electoral flanks. Increasingly, committees have
resorted to “executive” or “informal” sessions, held prior to official meetings,
where the members can talk freely and develop compromises without the intrusive
presence of outsiders. In formal meetings legislators may do little more than ratify
agreements reached in private. Rep. Bill Frenzel (R-Minn.), who began his legislative
service as a self-proclaimed “open meeting freak,” observed that “since our
meetings have been closed, our work has been less flawed... and our consensuses
much stronger. I think it’s the only way to fly.” The presence of lobbyists and
administrative officials at public sessions – where they can monitor members’
behavior, offer the texts of amendments, and notify their employers when and
where to apply pressure – may have made it more difficult for committees to act
decisively, to be responsible.

The rise of single-interest groups and PACs during the reform era may have made
legislators less willing to risk offending any potentially decisive electoral force.
Prudent lawmakers may feel obliged to resist party or presidential calls for
support. Previously, members could affirm their support undetected, in the quiet of
the committee room, or in a standing or teller vote on the floor, but at present
there are dangers in doing so. Members may be loath to act at all, preferring to
entrench themselves as ombudsmen and claiming credit for serving the district; or
they may limit their policy making to “position taking” – choosing sides on
substantive questions only when it is safe to do so. They may even obfuscate their
stands to minimize the danger of being caught on the wrong side of a policy issue
that turns out to be controversial.
– Larry Rieselbach 1994 – Congressional Reform

2
There are times, perhaps, when issues are better resolved in a more private
and orderly environment than in the committee room open to the media and the
public. This is accomplished, however, through “executive sessions” of the full
committee, and not with lobbyists approaching congressmen one by one, separate
and apart. Quiet diplomacy and compromise are hard to accomplish in the glare of
news cameras and when parties to the hearing are competing for the public
spotlight.
– Curtis & Westerfield 1992 – Congressional Intent
 2
With the waning of the civil rights and anti-war movements at the beginning
of the 1970s, Common Cause provided an avenue for continued political
participation by affluent whites, many of whom had been active in the presidential
campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and of George
McGovern in 1972. Although a part, and a significantly influential part, of the
Democratic constituency, the views of Common Cause activists epitomize elite
distrust of a basic element of politics, and of Democratic politics in particular: the
bartering and trading of votes, favors, jobs, and other benefits, o en behind closed
doors, which make the negotiation and resolution of much larger issues possible,
facilitating those compromises essential to the operation of government,
particularly in the pluralistic, non-ideological politics of the United States.
– Edsall 1984 – The New Politics of Inequality

2
The new aim was to clean up government, to impose a system of ethical
norms on elected officials,... to insure public access to official proceedings...These
changes unquestionably increased public access to both the legislative and
executive branches of government, although it is curious to note that there are still
no representatives of the general-interest press and television at the overwhelming
majority of congressional committee sessions. Instead, public access to these
meetings is used primarily by lobbyists and publications catering to special-
interest groups. Similarly, the Freedom of Information Act is used far more by
corporations seeking to gain an advantage over, or information about, competitors
than for the disclosure of governmental activity to the general public. Along the
same lines, campaign reforms have made information on sources of political
financial support more accessible, but these reforms have given institutional
legitimacy to many of the practices reformers were struggling to restrict.
– Edsall 1984 – The New Politics of Inequality


 2
During the past generation many of the gatekeepers of the old political order
were swept aside. The governmental process became more permeable as political
institutions and processes became increasingly open to popular participation and
increasingly subject to popular influence. The 1960s protesters demanded “power
to the people,” and apparently they got it. The great irony, then, is that a er this
explosion of openness and the transfer of power to the people, turnout in
elections fell and trust in government plummeted. Against all natural expectations,
Americans liked their government better, trusted their leaders more, and voted in
higher numbers in the bad old days when party bosses chose nominees in smoke-
filled rooms; when several dozen old White men (mostly Southerners) ran
Congress; when it was more difficult to get a hearing in court; when legislatures,
agencies, city councils, and local boards made decisions behind closed doors;
when big business, big labor, and big agriculture dominated the interest group
universe; and when politicians didn’t have the tools to figure out what their
constituents wanted. Why?
– Fiorina 2011 – Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation

2
Overall, our review [of transparency and accountability studies] found that
much of the current evidence relies on untested normative, positivist assumptions
and under-specified relationships between mechanisms and outcomes. Much of
the empirical work reviewed is based on poorly articulated, normatively-inspired
‘mixes’, that draw unevenly from the concepts of transparency, accountability,
good governance and empowerment. Virtually none of the literature gathered
explores possible risks or documents negative effects or arising from TAIs, although
some begins to note these at an anecdotal or speculative level.
– Gaventa & McGee 2011 – Impact of Transparency & Accountability (evidence)



 Warren & Mansbridge 2013 – Negotiating Agreement 2

2
Nothing in the Constitution requires public sessions of Congress, let alone
public hearings of its committees or public votes. In fact, the Constitution makes
no mention of committees at all. One of the first decisions of the First Continental
Congress in September of 1774 was to keep its proceedings secret, the custom of
the colonial assemblies. Likewise, the Constitutional Convention’s proceedings in
1787 were secret. However, one of the rules proposed for the Convention would
have permitted any member to call for the yeas and nays on any matter voted and
the printing in the minutes of the names for and against. According to James
Madison’s notes, Rufus King of Massachusetts objected to the rule on grounds that
it was unnecessary since acts of the Convention were not binding on constituents.
Moreover, he argued that such a record of votes would be “improper as changes of
opinion would be frequent in the course of the business and would fill the minutes
with contradictions.” George Mason seconded King’s objection. A record of the
opinion of members “would be an obstacle to a change of them on conviction,”
and, when promulgated in the future, “must furnish handles to the adversaries of
the Result of the Meeting.” The rule was subsequently dropped by unanimous
consent.
– Wolfensburger 2000 – Congress and the People

2
It is expected our doors will be shut, and communications upon the business
of the Convention be forbidden during its sitting. This, I think, myself, a proper
precaution to prevent mistakes and misrepresentation until the business shall
have been completed, when the whole may have a very different complexion from,
that in which the several crude and undigested parts might, in their first shape,
appear if submitted to the public eye.
– Mason 1789 – The Constitutional Convention

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 2
The conventional wisdom among judges, legislators, the public — and
especially the media — is that “open meetings” are a good thing. As a
generalization, it is certainly a superficially attractive proposition. On closer
examination...open meetings laws of the federal government and forty-eight other
states, have only made the inherent problems worse. To capture all discussions
merely because they are called deliberations is an impossibility. To try to do so
only guarantees that fewer discussions and deliberations will take place, and that
fewer wise decisions will be made.
– Johnson 1994 – Open Meetings and Close Minds

2
Newspapers and television corporations and their litigation and lobbying
organizations are the most vigorous proponents of openness of meetings unless, of
course, it is the media’s records or meetings that are at stake.
– Johnson 2994 – Open Meetings and Close Minds


 Julian Zelizer 1998 – Taxing America 2

2
Lobbyists...have a kind of nuisance impact. They can make life somewhat
unpleasant for officials who do not go along with them: It is embarrassing to vote
against someone who is watching.
– Lester Milbrath 1963 - The Washington Lobbyists

2
To appreciate one of the central virtues of secret balloting, consider the fact
that in a number of organizations, the leadership, for obvious reasons, insists that
the preferences and opinions of the rank and file be revealed through a hand count
instead of a secret ballot. Transparency, in that case, is of way of controlling the
membership.
– Albert Breton 2007 – The Economics of Transparency in Politics

 2
Leaders and members regularly set up roll-call (transparent) votes in full
knowledge that these votes will have no effect on policy outcomes, but they
nevertheless stage them for messaging purposes – that is, to define the differences
between the parties in hopes of making their party look more attractive to voters
or key constituencies than the opposition. (intentionally driving partisanship)
– Frances Lee 2016 – Insecure Majorities

2
A number of factors may have contributed to the explosion of corporate
lobbying. An onslaught of environmental and consumer regulations in the late
1960s and early 1970s provoked an antiregulatory backlash, and the authorization
of political action committees in 1974 encouraged business to take sides in
elections. But the most compelling explanation is the revolution in transparency
that unfolded at the same time. Before the sunshine reforms, lobbyists could rarely
tell for sure whether their targets were voting as intended. That lack of assurance
proved crucial to keeping special interests on the back foot. During the
deliberations that led to the Tax Reform Act of 1969, for example, members of
Congress approved all kinds of special giveaways in open session, but when the
conference committee met behind closed doors to dra the final language, it
quietly stripped the pork away, dashing the hopes of scores of special interest
groups. As the political scientist Lester Milbrath had noted in the early 1960s, “A
lobbyist who thinks about using bribery . . . has no assurance that the bribed
officials will stay bought.”
– James D’Angelo & Brent Ranalli 2019
The Dark Side of Sunlight (Foreign Affairs Magazine)

2
I feel the committee produces a better bill behind closed doors. There is less
posturing, less playing to the audiences. We are able to move much more quickly
and I think, in the end, we do a better job.
– Rep. Gradison 1985 – Rewriting Tax Code (Fessler)


 2
With a closed markup you can always say to lobbyists or constituents that
you fought like a tiger for their position and asked for a record vote, but not enough
members raised their hands. Members almost feel obligated to demand a record
vote in public, and then you have members voting in a way they don’t really want.
– Rep. Don Pease 1985 – Rewriting Tax Code (Fessler)

2
Perhaps it is not then surprising that public distrust has grown in the very
years in which openness and transparency have been so avidly pursued.
– Onora O’Neill 2002 – A Question of Trust (Reith Lectures)

2
There is little reason to think that transparency and openness are going to
increase trust. Transparency can encourage people to be less honest, so increasing
deception and reducing reasons for trust: those who know that everything they say
or write is to be made public may massage the truth… Demands for universal
transparency are likely to encourage the evasions, hypocrisies and half-truths that
we usually refer to as ‘political correctness’, but which might more forthrightly be
called either self-censorship or deception.
– Onora O’Neill 2002 – A Question of Trust (Reith Lectures)

2
My bottom line is that closed mark-ups can o en produce better legislation
and therefore serve the public interest.
– Rep Don Pease 1984 – Opening up Congress


 2
Trying to make government more accountable has backfired...And yet, when
government seems to fail, Americans habitually resort to the same solutions: more
process, more transparency, more appeals to courts. Each dose of this medicine
leaves government more sluggish. To counter the ensuing disappointment,
reformers urge yet another dose. A er Speaker Tip O’Neill retired from Congress, in
1987, an interviewer asked him how the House of Representatives had changed
over his 35 years of service. He memorably answered, “The people are better. The
results are worse.” His answer might be generalized across the American system of
government: the process is better (at least as better is conventionally defined:
more transparent, more participatory), but the results are worse.
– David Frum 2014 – The Transparency Trap

2
Reformers keep trying to eliminate backroom wheeling and dealing from
American governance. What they end up doing instead is eliminating governance
itself, not just in the White House but in Congress, too.
– David Frum 2014 – The Transparency Trap

2
Procedures such as voice votes or closed committee meetings which
screened legislators from public scrutiny...these defenses against pressure-group
power have been weakened or have disappeared.
– Graham Wilson 1981 – Interest Groups in the United States


 CQ 2013 – How Congress Works 2

*NOTE: In 1990, Mitchell passed the most significant environmental legislation since the late 1960s. And in
order to do it, he reversed the notions of the 1970s transparency.


 2
During the 1980s there was some retreat from the [sunshine] reforms,
including votes by a number of key panels to close their doors during consideration
of major legislation. Votes to close committees had to be conducted in open
session by a roll call with a quorum present. The House Ways and Means
Committee, perhaps the most heavily lobbied committee in the House, chose to
close its doors to write such landmark legislation as a historic tax-overhaul bill in
1985 and trade and catastrophic illness insurance bills in 1987. Ways and Means
chair Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., argued: “It’s just difficult to legislate. I'm not
ashamed about closed doors. We want to get the product out.” Other panels –
notably House Appropriations subcommittees – also met privately to dra
legislation. Sometimes committees’ decisions were made by small groups of
members behind the scenes and then ratified in open session. Defenders of closed
sessions argued that committee members were more candid, markups more
expeditious, and better laws written away from lobbyists’ glare.
– CQ 2013 – How Congress Works

2
Most of the studies of the Congress of the 1950s emphasized additional
techniques, which the legislator could use to avoid unwelcome pressure from
interest groups. Many of these turned on adroit use of Congressional procedure.
Rather than oppose an interest group publicly, thus encouraging retaliation,
legislators could have a ‘voice vote’ in which the position of each individual
would not be recorded. Legislators could vote for a general position favored by
interest groups, but could support amendments undermining the bill. Legislators
could acquiesce in the adoption of conference-committee reports which were
worded in such a way that they electively sabotaged the bill they supposedly
approved.
– Graham Wilson 1981 – Interest Groups in the United States


 2
There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than
it has – in particular, projects…such as the ones (these are the really sexy
innovations for the movement) to make it trivially easy to track every possible
source of influence on a member of Congress, mapped against every single vote
that the member has made. These projects assume that they are seeking an
obvious good. No doubt they will have a profound effect. But will the effect of these
projects – at least on their own, unqualified or unrestrained by other
considerations – really be for the good? Do we really want the world that they
righteously envisage?
– Lawrence Lessig 2009 – Against Transparency

2
Open meetings, open rules, and unlimited recorded votes seemed like good
ideas when they were proposed, and they were backed by Common Cause and
others who sought to reduce the power of special interests. Unfortunately, these
reforms were based on a faulty understanding of the mechanisms that allow for
citizens’ control. We now know that open meetings filled with lobbyists, and
recorded votes, on scores of particularistic amendments, serve to increase the
powers of special interests, not to diminish them.
– Douglas Arnold 1990 (Princeton) – The Logic of Congressional Action


 2
Examples abound of congressional action to serve [special interests] when
both conditions [of transparency] are satisfied. In 1980 so drink bottlers obtained
an antitrust exception so that they could have exclusive franchises in specific
geographic areas, thus eliminating any competition from alternative suppliers of
identical so drinks. They did so by forcing legislators to stand up and be counted
on a bill that was highly salient to local bottlers and yet not even potentially salient
to consumers. Members of both House and Senate supported the bottlers
overwhelmingly (377 to 34, and 89 to 3). In 1982 used car dealers obtained an
exemption from regulation by the Federal Trade Commission by forcing roll-call
votes in both House and Senate. Most legislators sided with used car dealers, who
were both attentive to congressional action and large financial contributors, rather
than with used car purchasers, who were unaware of what was happening and who
could hardly be roused by an issue with such indirect effects. Both House and
Senate supported the auto dealers (286 to 133, and 69 to 22). The story of the 1981
All Savers Certificate shows a similar deference to attentive publics. Once again the
issue was very important to savings banks, but not potentially salient to ordinary
voters.
– Douglas Arnold 1990 (Princeton) – The Logic of Congressional Action


 2
The reason for the institutional members generating different emotions in
the public may in part be found in the institutions themselves. Congress does its
work in the open. The public sees almost all of the dirty laundry – both the
perceived inefficiency (such as the disagreements, the bickering, the haggling, the
obstructions put before the president) and the perceived inequity (such as the
alleged influence of special interests, and of selfish concerns on the part of
members themselves – scandals, perquisites, and so on). The public feels angry
and disgusted at what it sees. The work of the Supreme Court, on the other hand, is
done behind closed doors. The media occasionally report on a Supreme Court
decision, but even then the public hears only the final summary judgment. What
went on in private or even in the courtroom itself remains a mystery to all but a few
Americans. This secretive and mysterious process is more likely to generate
feelings of uneasiness and fear than anger and disgust. People are not sure what
the Supreme Court is doing or what it will do next, but they know what Congress
will do next, and they feel angry and disgusted about the whole thing. So the
processes of the separate institutions may in fact feed into the emotional reactions
people have toward the institutional membership
– Hibbing & Theiss-Morse 1995 – Congress as Public Enemy


 2
              AN ENEMY BECAUSE IT IS PUBLIC
On the basis of both our focus-group sessions and the survey responses, we believe
an important element of distaste for Congress either has been missed altogether or
at least under emphasized by previous investigators. To wit: Congress embodies
practically everything Americans dislike about politics. It is large and therefore
ponderous; it operates in a presidential system and is therefore independent and
powerful; it is open and therefore disputes are played out for all to see; it is
based on compromise and therefore reminds people of the disturbing fact that
most issues do nor have right answers. Much of what the public dislikes about
Congress is endemic to what a legislature is. Its perceived inefficiencies and
inequities are there for all to see.

Focus-group participants and survey respondents are disgusted by what they

perceive to be undue interest-group influence in Congress. “Why doesn’t Congress
represent real people?” participants would ask. Again, part of Congress’s problem
is that perceived inequities are played out in public. People frequently see stories
of members of Congress being too cozy with special interests, and they find such
behavior disgusting. Moreover, when Congress does take action it is seldom fast.
Madison believed this was good. He saw the Senate especially as protecting the
people from themselves (Madison, 1964) and their oscillating moods and whims.
But the public does not like overly deliberate politics. They would like to see
something done quickly when in fact legislatures - particularly legislatures like the
U.S. Congress - are not well-equipped for rapid action. Viewed in this context, it
should be less than a shock that the public does not like Congress. The public
prefers some degree of certainty, and when there is not certainty the public wants
to believe that disputes take place on the merits of the issues.

Thus, the very openness of the legislative process, which might otherwise be
thought to endear Congress to the people, is much more likely to have the opposite
effect. Nasty, visible disputes within the executive branch are fairly rare, and
interest-group activity there is seldom reported. Occasionally, cabinet rivalries and
leaked position papers give the general public a glimpse of maneuverings at the
highest policy levels of the presidency, but such instances are infrequent. For the
most part, proposals flow from the White House with apparent unanimity from
those involved. Dissenters remain quiet or fall in line a er the decision is made, in
accord with the structure of a hierarchically organized entity. And the Supreme
Court, of course, has been artful at camouflaging its disputes. The Court’s
“bickering” takes place behind carefully closed doors. Decisions, even when

divided, are announced cleanly, and the public remains largely unaware of
dissenting opinions. No open disputes, visible partisan stances, or transparent
interest-group machinations can be seen. Decisions are presented as final
products, not works in progress.

The public, for the most part, does not like the partisan debates, competing
interests, and compromises that many close observers of modem democratic
politics believe are unavoidable. Congress is the institution in which these
distasteful elements of politics are most readily visible. Thus, while Congress is
sometimes viewed by the public as an enemy, we wish to call attention to the fact
that it is o en viewed as an enemy because it is so public.
– Hibbing & Thiess-Morse 1995 – Congress as Public Enemy

2
The alternative route for those who seek to increase citizens’ control of
government is to reform congressional procedures...so that legislators are
responsive to general interests as well as group interests. Although this was the
intent of those who reformed procedures in the 1970s, many of the reforms have
had the opposite effect. Reformers demanded that all committee meetings must
be open, but all this openness has actually allowed narrowly based interest groups
to monitor legislators more closely and has thereby made legislators more
responsive to group interests. Reformers demanded an end to the closed rule
because it was antidemocratic, but most of the amendments proposed without
benefit of the rule have been particularistic proposals that serve group interests.
Reformers demanded an end to secret, unrecorded votes, but the increased
reliance on recorded votes has actually made it easier for narrow groups to hold
legislators accountable because most of these votes are on particularistic
amendments.
– Arnold 1990 – The Logic of Congressional Action


 Longstreth 1983 – Washington Post 2
The Government-in-the-Sunshine Act isn’t working

2
Obey, in an interview, blamed much of the push for secrecy on lobbyists. “You
have a number of members frustrated because things they have said or done in
open markups have been garbled by trade association newsletters and lobby
groups,” he said. “Also, you have a feeling that the lobby groups in this country
have become so single-minded and so intense that maybe it’s better to operate
behind closed doors. You sometimes wonder who is having more influence – the
lobbyists or the members.”
– Rep. David Obey D-Wi 1979 – Conference Committees Open Doors (CQ) 
 2
The typical American solution to perceived government dysfunction has been
to try to expand democratic participation and transparency. Almost all of these
reforms failed in their objectives of creating higher levels of accountable
government. The reason is that democratic publics are not in fact able by
background or temperament to make large numbers of complex public policy
choices; what has filled the void are well-organized groups of activists who are
unrepresentative of the public as a whole. The obvious solution to this problem
would be to roll back some of the would-be democratizing reforms, but no one
dares suggest that what the country needs is a bit less participation and
transparency.
– Francis Fukuyama 2014 – Political Order and Political Decay

Francis Fukuyama 2014 – Political Order and Political Decay 2


 2
Rolling television coverage of Congress has been linked by many to the
decline of deliberation in that body. Rather than debating with colleagues,
members of Congress are in fact addressing activist audiences but in the media
ether. One former senator I know, who has decried the deterioration of comity in
Congress, noted that the most pleasurable moments of his career were spent on
the intelligence committee, whose secrecy allowed members to say for once what
they honestly believed.
– Francis Fukuyama 2015 – The Limits of Transparency

Jacob Straus 2012 – The Rise of Roll Call Votes (pdf 3.3MB) 2

2
For information to be accurate and accessible, transparency requires the kind
of regulation that proponents claim it is supposed to replace.
– Amitai Etzioni 2014 – Transparency is Overrated


 2
Transparency provides users with the illusion of openness while actually
serving to obfuscate.
– Amitai Etzioni 2014 – Transparency is Overrated

2
Sometimes the many calls you hear for more transparency in the workings of
government may also be wrong...Negotiations cannot be public, as the parties will
not be able to talk freely and frankly enough to do the work necessary to reach an
integrative solution.
– Jane Mansbridge 2010 – Against Accountability

2
Legislative secrecy…has been part of the policymaking process from
Congress’s very beginning, and it remains an integral aspect of the lawmaking
process. The Framers – who dra ed the U.S. Constitution in closed meetings – even
included a secrecy provision in that document. Article I, Section 5, states, “Each
House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the
same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy.” Moreover,
when the first Senators gathered in New York for their first session [in 1789], they
seemed to take it for granted that they would meet behind closed doors.
– Walter Oleszek 2011 – Secrecy and Transparency

2
Transparency theory’s flaws result from a simplistic model of linear
communication that assumes that information, once set free from the state that
creates it, will produce an informed, engaged public that will hold officials
accountable. To the extent that this model fails to describe accurately the state,
government information, and the public, as well as the communications process of
which they are component parts, it provides a flawed basis for open government
laws.
– Mark Fenster 2006 – The Opacity of Transparency


 2
Checking the ways other people vote is likely to be driven by private
concerns, not by a concern for the common good. Vote checking, then, is likely to
be performed for the wrong reasons.
– Manin 2015 – Secrecy and Publicity

2
Committees now open their proceedings to the public. Many are televised. All
of this allows lobbyists to keep a close eye on events—and to confirm that the
politicians to whom they have contributed deliver value. In short, in the name of
“reform,” Americans over the past half century have weakened political authority.
Instead of yielding more accountability, however, these reforms have yielded more
lobbying, more expense, more delay, and more indecision.
– David Frum 2014 – The Transparency Trap

Payne 1991 – Culture of Spending 2


 2
Since the 1960's...legislatures, parties and other administrative agencies have
sought to make their workings more transparent and responsive to the popular
will. Yet the unintended consequence of this “democratization of democracy” is
that all these institutions have become prey to the activities of professional
lobbyists. Open committee meetings in Congress; primary elections to select
delegates to national political conventions; changes to the system of campaign
funding; the rise of referendums in state and municipal politics -- together, these
well-intentioned innovations have tended to debase the political process.
– Niall Ferguson 2003 – Overdoing Democracy (NYTimes)

2
Many of us have a reflexive belief that open political processes are more
accountable, but we don’t o en ask “accountable to who”? It’s easy to assume that
the accountability is to a broader public interest. But in practice, transparency
means that focused special interests can keep tabs on each proposal. If the special
interests object, they can whip up a storm of protests. They also can threaten
attempts at compromise, and push instead toward holding hard lines and party
lines. Greater openness means a greater ability to monitor, to pressure, and to
punish possible and perceived deviations.
– Timothy Taylor 2019 – When Special Interests Play in the Sunlight

2
Human experience teaches us that those who expect public dissemination of
their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their
own interest to the detriment of the decision-making process.
– Justice Waren Burger 1974 – Supreme Court


 2
Members of Congress would have to determine whether the advantages of
openness outweigh those of secrecy. Lest anyone think that opening formal
meetings of any type will place the entire legislative process out in the open, the
experience of committees must be reviewed. A er committees opened their doors
to the public, much of the key decision making occurred in the hallways, in the
anterooms, and at pre-meeting meetings. There is a limit to “sunshine”
procedures. Certain issues must be discussed in private. The legislative process
would grind to a halt if everything had to be done in public. Just as there is a
legitimate “private space” in each of our lives, public officials must be allowed to
have some private space to develop policy agreements.
– Stephen Frantzich & John Sullivan 1996 – The C-SPAN Revolution

2
I think TV is the biggest evil that has come to the House. Speaker O’Neill
predicted what would happen...We now have four hundred and thirty-five potential
stars of daytime television who are acutely aware that there are cameras in the
chamber. They use them to get messages out. They plan for sound bites, things
that can be quickly snatched by the evening news. It’s created a nastiness and a
level of personal attack that was unheard of.
– Donnald Anderson – Kessler 1997 (Inside Congress)

2
Indeed, in the days when Appropriations committees saw their mission as
cutting spending rather than maximizing it, appropriators carried out virtually all
of their activities, including hearings, behind closed doors... William Natcher, D-Ky.,
closed his markups a er taking over the Labor-HHS Subcommittee in 1979, arguing
that it would be too difficult to put together a fiscally responsible bill if special
interests could record how every member voted on every amendment. The
temptation to vote yes on everything would be too great.
– George Hager 1991 – Behind Closed Doors (CQ Magazine)


 2
A huge percentage of time is spent on how to use the political process to
create a vote that will embarrass the other side. You basically have people working
to make each other look as bad and stupid as possible.
– Rep Eric Fingerhut – Kessler 1997 (Inside Congress)

2
Disclosure also induces policymakers to distort the process of information
gathering and evaluation. In contrast, when no information can be disclosed, the
government has no incentive to manipulate information. Secrecy is therefore
effective at protecting the integrity of the decision-making process.
– Patacconi & Vikander 2013 – Misuse of Info for Public Debate

2
Members…at one time did not have to choose between the goals of
maximizing reelection prospects and legislating in the national interest, the new
transparency and interest group attentiveness to voting records, combined with
the rewards of campaign contributions for acceptable conduct, forced that choice
more and more o en.
– Donald Wolfensberger 2012 – Getting Back to Legislating

2
In some cases, members may request a roll call vote in an effort ot put a
political opponent on the record. More o en than not, this happens for measures
that are politically unpopular for the opposition party. In making these requests
(o en requests from lobbyists), members are using the electronic voting system to
potentially score political points or stop legislation they are opposed to...these
measures are o en designed to ‘kill’ the underlying piece of legislation if they are
adopted.
– Jacob Straus 2012 – The Rise of Roll Call Votes


 2
Probably the most significant amendment relating to the legislative
procedure of the House adopted during debate on the 1970 Act (and nearly the
only provision of the measure to generate any notable public interest) was the
proposal – sponsored by 182 members – to record House members’ names on
teller votes, either by House tally clerks or electronic equipment, with publication
of the voting in the Congressional Record as has been done with roll-call votes.
Under the prior procedure, dating back to early British parliamentary practice, only
the total votes on each side of a teller vote, which takes place in the Committee of
the Whole House on the State of the Union, were published. Since any amendment
defeated while the House sits in Committee of the Whole cannot be the subject of a
later record vote when the Committee rises, members could vote anonymously to
defeat an amendment they might feel obligated to support if their position were to
be made public. Most amendments to legislation adopted in the House are decided
by voice, standing, or teller votes, all – until the 1970 act – unrecorded. With
recordation of teller votes, the number of members voting and thus participating in
the amending process has been increased, and the outcome of the vote
occasionally changed.
– Bruce Hopkins 1972 – Congressional Reform: Toward a Modern Congress

Drew Middleton 1955 – Open Covenants Unopenly Arrived At

 2

 2
One principle surely is that the Government’s case for a measure of secrecy is
not altogether frivolous or self‑serving. “The Federalist” is generally worth
consulting on these matters; and its authors clearly specified two fields where
secrecy seemed to them essential. The first was diplomatic negotiation: “It seldom
happens in the negotiation of treaties, of whatever nature, but that perfect secrecy
and immediate dispatch are sometimes requisite.” Woodrow Wilson, it is true, later
appeared to repudiate this doctrine when he said that “diplomacy shall proceed
always frankly and in the public view” and called for “open covenants of peace,
openly arrived at.” Before World War I the French Assembly did not know the secret
clauses of the Franco‑Russian alliance; nor did the British Foreign Secretary inform
even his own Cabinet of the military understandings between the British and
French General Staffs. This is what Wilson hoped to abolish.

But, as he himself made clear at Versailles, he really meant by “diplomacy” not the
processes but the results of negotiation. In practice he favored plenty of talk out of
“the public view” but no concealment of results—i.e., open covenants secretly
arrived at. As for the negotiating process, Jules Cambon, who was French
Ambassador to Berlin before World War I and whom that acute student of
diplomacy Harold Nicolson regarded as perhaps the best professional of the
century, was only mildly exaggerating when he wrote, “The day secrecy is
abolished, negotiation of any kind will become impossible.” His recent
trans‑Atlantic shuttling suggests that Henry Kissinger would agree. Whether
blowing the secrecy destroys his capability for future private negotiations is a
problem that one hopes Mr. Kissinger has pondered.

A second field noted in “The Federalist” as requiring secrecy was that of

intelligence: “There are cases where the most useful intelligence may be obtained,
if the persons possessing it can be relieved from apprehensions of discovery.”
Contemplation of these two fields led “The Federalist” to conclude: “So o en and
so essentially have we heretofore suffered from the want of secrecy and dispatch,
that the Constitution would have been inexcusably defective, if no attention had
been paid to those objects.” In such terms “The Federalist” vindicated the right of
the executive branch to conduct negotiations and, by inference, intelligence
operations, without any immediate obligation to supply Congress or the people
the detail of what it was doing. So from the start the American Government has
been into secrecy...You can’t run a Government if every important secret is going to
be handed over to the press.

– Arthur Schesinger Jr. 1972 – The Secrecy Dilemma
 2
Official plans and decisions which, if prematurely disclosed, would lead to
speculation in lands or commodities, preemptive buying, private enrichment and
higher governmental costs.
– Arthur Schesinger Jr. 1972 – The Secrecy Dilemma

2
Senator Russel Long argued that “every senator is going to change his
pattern of conduct if the Senate is on television” (Congressional Record 15 April
1982, 3582). His prediction was that individual senators, given their ambitious
nature and their political goals, would be more attracted than ever to the
opportunities for garnering favorable publicity on the Senate floor. “There is no
way, in my judgment, and I am positive I am right about his,” he argued, “that we
can put the Senate of the United States on live television without greatly increasing
the amount of time that Senators are going to spend making speeches here in the
U.S. Senate” (Congressional Record 2 Feb. 1982, 279). “Every Senator is a prima
donna in one degree or another,” he told the Rules Committee, “and everyone of
them is going to be tempted to make himself a speech for the folks back home ....
And for those who are motivated to take an interest in being President of the
United States, hoping lightning might strike them some day [and he estimated 61
such senators] what better opportunity to appear just as o en as possible, say
something that they think would have some appeal to people across the country”
(U.S. Senate 1981, 146). The scenario he saw was one of ever increasing
individualism. More political speechmaking (grandstanding), he argued, would
diminish the Senate’s capacity to conduct its normal legislative business. “The
people don’t send us here to wage a campaign for our reelection or wage a
campaign for some other office,” he said. “They elect us here and send us to
legislate and pass laws that are in their interest” (U.S. Senate 1981, 76)... Long also
predicted more publicity inspired amendments and roll calls ( Congressional
Record, 3 Feb. 1982, 345). He further predicted that debate would be less than ever
internally focused – senator to senator – and more directed to the outside
audience, thus trivializing and atomizing deliberations.
– Richard Fenno 1989 – The Senate through the Looking Glass - The Debate over
Television

 2
Everything that is special about the Senate, said Senator Russell Long, “is
foreign to the idea of putting the matter on television, which would tend to make
the Senate easier to stampede and make the difficult job of statesmanship, that
type of statesmanship which requires enormous courage on the part of a senator, a
great deal more difficult” (Congressional Record 15 Apr. 1982, 3582). In Long’s view,
the scheme to pack the Supreme Court would not have been stopped and the
Panama Canal Treaty would not have been ratified in the presence of television
(Congressional Record 2 Feb. 1982, 280). Nor would Long have been as likely to
have defended fellow Senator Thomas Dodd, nor would Daniel Inouye have been
as likely to have defended Senator Harrison Williams, he speculated. “You need a
Senate of the type we have known,” he told his colleagues, “where statesmanship
can prevail, and you should not be doing things that are going to make it more
difficult for statesmanship to prevail in this body” (Congressional Record 15 Apr.
1982, 3582). That is exactly what he believed television would do.
– Richard Fenno 1989 – The Senate through the Looking Glass - The Debate over
Television

2
In 2006, the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress, having
campaigned against “earmarks” (targeted expenditures),began to publish which
lawmakers had voted for and obtained them. Here transparency, not secrecy,
yielded perverse results: earmarks increased, in part because legislators saw what
other legislators were getting and demanded more, in part because interest groups
could more easily monitor whether legislators were delivering the goods.
– Adrian Vermeule 2010 (Harvard Law) – Open-Secret Voting

2
In the Italian Parliament of the 1970s and 1980s, the practice was that bills
designated as issues of confidence by the government would be voted upon first by
open ballot, then by secret ballot. The results frequently differed. In 1986, Bettino
Craxi’s government (widely regarded as one of the most corrupt and intimidating in
history) won the open vote of confidence by a margin greater than 100, only to be
defeated on the secret ballot. Craxi was forced to resign.
– Adrian Vermeule 2010 (Harvard Law) – Open-Secret Voting

 2
Open voting can induce posturing, political correctness, or, what is equally
bad, bending over backwards to signal that the voter is not politically correct; it
also makes possible credible commitments to corrupt bargains with other voters or
third parties (special interests or other members of Congress).
– Adrian Vermeule 2010 (Harvard Law) – Open-Secret Voting

2
The ways in which positions can be registered are numerous and o en
imaginative. There are floor addresses ranging from weighty orations to mass-
produced “nationality day statements.” There are speeches before home groups,
television appearances, letters, newsletters, press releases, ghostwritten books,
Playboy articles, even interviews with political scientists. On occasion
congressmen generate what amount to petitions; whether or not to sign the 1956
Southern Manifesto defying school desegregation rulings was an important
decision for southern members. Outside the roll call process the congressman is
usually able to tailor his positions to suit his audiences. A solid consensus in the
constituency calls for ringing declarations… Division or uncertainty in the
constituency calls for waffling; in the late 1960s a congressman had to be a poor
politician indeed not to be able to come up with an inoffensive statement on
Vietnam (“We must have peace with honor at the earliest possible moment
consistent with the national interest”). On a controversial issue a Capitol Hill office
normally prepares two form letters to send out to constituent letter writers--one for
the pros and one (not directly contradictory) for the antis.

Yet it is on roll calls that the crunch comes; there is no way for a member to avoid
making a record on hundreds of issues, some of which are controversial in the
home constituencies. Of course, most roll call positions considered in isolation are
not likely to cause much of a ripple at home. But broad voting patterns can and do;
member “ratings” calculated by the Americans for Democratic Action, Americans
for Constitutional Action, and other outfits are used as guidelines in the deploying
of electoral resources.
– David Mayhew 1974 – The Electoral Connection


 2
The congressional sunshine initiative became a tool for the very special
interests whose power the reforms were supposed to dilute. Corporations and
lobbying groups have seized on the open hearings to help them hold legislators
accountable as never before.
– Martha Hamilton 1984 – The Washington Post – Opening Up Congress

2
During the closed House Ways and Means Committee mark-up, the action
was brisk and lobbyists and the press were kept outside, littering the halls of the
Longworth House office building with candy wrappers and cigarette butts. On the
(open) Senate side, mark-up sessions were long and sometimes chaotic. The
dra ing took weeks. Everything was subject to change, with lobbyists reversing key
votes. What took weeks on the (open) Senate side took two days in (closed) Ways
and Means. And what took the better part of a week on the Senate floor and ended
at dawn a er a punishing 19-hour session, took just hours on the House floor.
– Hamilton 1984 – The Washington Post – Opening Up Congress

2
That transparency checks corruption is an article of faith among reformers,
but its benefits are elusive. This paper offers five core arguments: First, most
transparency policies miss much of what many citizens regard as corrupt. Second,
even for the sorts of corruption directly targeted by transparency reforms, effects
will o en be minimal. Third, transparency can actually make corruption worse.
Fourth, transparency can help powerful interests protect their advantages while
weakening countervailing forces. Fi h, for transparency to check corruption, the
data it reveals must be used in organized and sustained ways. While transparency
will always have a place as an aspect of good governance, when it comes to
corruption the alternatives may be counterintuitive – for example, “blinding” some
processes that are now publicly disclosed. Understanding these problems is
essential if we are to improve on the indifferent results of reform and address the
political malaise afflicting many liberal democracies.
– Michael Johnston 2018 (dra ) – The Sunlight Paradox


 2
The deliberation and the decisions have to happen someplace. And in the
1970s when the conference committees would rule between the House and the
Senate they have to take a bill and make it identical, they use to be private. They
became public under a law in the 1970s and then more people wanted to be on
these committees and the cameras were there, the press was there. So, they ended
up having to make decisions, where? During the bathroom breaks. And the
decisions were made in the Senators only bathrooms. And they would just huddle
in there…so all this distortion happens. Increasingly what we see, on TV, is just for
public consumption. Because everybody’s watching, so they just grandstand. You
don’t get the same kind of deliberation…I also resonate with the idea that trust is
central to it all.
– David King 2014 – Tensions in Transparency (Harvard talk)

2
On their face, these sunshine reforms of the 1970s—open procedures,
campaign finance regulations, and ethics codes—and their periodic fine-tuning
since then, were designed to make it possible, although not necessarily easy, for
the public to assess the degree to which members of Congress pursue their own
interests at the expense of the public’s. But in adopting even such praiseworthy
reforms as increasing congressional visibility, and thus accountability, the
lawmakers may have had less readily defensible intentions. Although little noted in
the press or by the public, there were clear implications for the political parties in
the requirement that Congress perform in public. The more visible any action, the
more that competing pressures – from the president, interest groups, and the
public generally – come into play; the greater the extent and intensity of such
pressures, the less likely members will be to defer to party leaders and support
party line.
– Larry Rieselbach 1994 – Congressional Reform


 2
With committee proceedings and voting matters of public record, lawmakers
can no longer hide behind closed doors and unrecorded votes; they must take care
to protect their political futures. The presence of lobbyists and administrative
officials at public sessions – where they can monitor members’ behavior, offer texts
of amendments, and notify their employers when and where to apply pressure –
may make it more difficult for committees to act decisively. Increasingly, they have
resorted to “executive” or “informal” sessions, held prior to official meetings,
where members can talk freely and develop compromises without the intrusive
presence of outsiders.
– Larry Rieselbach 1994 – Encyclopedia of Policy Studies

2
However, other data — especially evidence assembled by behavioral
economists — strongly indicate that people are neither as able to process
information nor as likely to act on it as transparency theory presumes. Hence, in
situations in which adverse outcomes have a relatively high disutility (e.g., there is
a high probability that they will cause death, serious bodily damage, or loss of
one’s home or life’s savings) or the information is complex (e.g., medical
information), drawing on other sources of regulation in addition to transparency
seems called for. Administrative reform cannot, however, deliver on transparency’s
metaphoric promise. The state’s large, organizationally and physically dispersed
public bureaucracies perform a variety of functions and make a staggering number
of decisions of varying importance, not all of which can be viewed before the fact
or even easily reviewed later. The state is too big, too remote, and too enclosed to
be completely visible. The very nature of the state, in other words, creates the
conditions of its obscurity. It can never be fully transparent, at least not in the
sense that the term and its populist suspicions of the state require. Overinvestment
in transparency as a metaphor leads open government advocates to lament
insufficiently effective administrative laws, while the debate over how best to make
the government open too o en focuses on how to make the state permanently and
entirely visible rather than on devising means to improve public oversight and
education.
– Amitai Etzioni 2010 – Is Transparency the Best Disinfectant?


 2
In some cases, particularly when sharply conflicting interests must be
accommodated, freedom from the pressure of public opinion may be desirable.
Moreover, public scrutiny of the government’s decision-making process might have
an adverse effect on government decisionmakers. Officials might be reluctant to
request information lest they create a public image of ignorance.
– Justice Department Spokesman 1978
– George Kennedy – Advocates of Openness


 2
In a classic discussion of international negotiation Fred Iklé observed that
“secrecy has two major effect s in diplomacy. Firstly, it keeps domestic groups
ignorant of the process of negotiation, thereby preventing them from exerting
pressures during successive phases of bargaining . Second, it leaves third parties in
the dark and thus reduces their influence” (Iklé, 1964, p. 134).

Implicit in this is that lack of secrecy allows domestic groups to exert pressure and
allows third parties to increase their influence. Iklé’s insight can be profitably
placed in a broader theoretical context.

In analysing the workings of the American political system, E.E. Schattschneider

argues that political conflict can be thought of as a fight: “Every fight consists of
two parts: (1) the few individuals who are actively engaged at the centre and (2) the
audience that is irresistibly attracted to the scene ... the outcome of every conflict
is determined by the extent that the audience becomes involved in it.”

Hence, “if a fight starts, watch the crowd [since] the outcome of all conflict is
determined by the scope of its contagion. The number of people involved in any
conflict determines what happens; every increase or reduction in the number of
participants, affects the result.” The consequence is that “the most important
strategy of politics is concerned with the scope of the conflict... So great is the
change in the nature of any conflict likely to be as a consequence of the widening
involvement of people in it that the original participants are apt to lose control of
the conflict altogether” (Schattschneider, 1960, pp. 2-3 ).

Conflicts which are liable to spread have a dynamic of their own, with the original
parties un able to control the outcome (Schattschneider, 1960, pp. 2-3). As more
people become aware that a decision is to be taken or a ‘fight’ is in progress, more
people have the opportunity to seek to exert influence or to join the conflict. Such a
process will not be neutral: the make-up of the audience will determine who
benefits from such a process of expansion.

Iklé’s advocacy of secrecy can be seen as a particular form of the control of scope.
Limiting the range of parties both simplifies negotiation and excludes particular
groups . Defining the scope of a negotiation and managing the reaction of those
not at the table is a part of any negotiation. The problem is that the result of the
information explosion is a ‘Schattschneider effect’: in a shrinking world it becomes
increasingly difficult to maintain the secrecy that Iklé recommends. Negotiations

will increasingly be carried out in the glare of publicity, so that it becomes easier
for domestic political groups or third parties to exert pressure on the negotiators,
who in turn must work harder to deal with the third dimension .
– Robin Brown 2012 – Negotiation in Three Dimensions

2
Congress’s deliberations are more accessible and transparent to the public
than those of perhaps any other kind of organization.
– Walter Oleszek 2014 – Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process

2
Mediators may wish to make use of opportunities for informal exchange as a
way of getting things unstuck. If the formal process of offer and counteroffer, as it
takes place at the negotiating table, is being used to state extreme positions in
public, and the disputants have reached an impasse, it may be wise to create
opportunities for more informal arrangements. UNEP Executive Director, Mustafa K.
Tolba, appears to have done just this during the Montreal Protocol negotiations on
the depletion of the ozone layer. Tolba made extensive use of “informal
consultations” designed to help narrow the gap between the divergent views of
negotiators on central issues, and accomplished this away from the plenary
session. (Climate and Environment)
– Gunnar Sjostedt 1992 – International Environmental Negotiation: Insights for
Practice

2
Without reporters or lobbyists in the room, senators are free to debate
difficult decisions and make deals without the pressures to posture or conform to
narrow ideological or parochial views.
– Colleen Shogan 2012 – (Jacob Straus) Party and Procedure


 2
Four reasons explaining the National Defense Authorization’s repeated
successes were mentioned repeatedly throughout the staff interviews:
bipartisanship, routine committee processes, staff interactions, and closed
markups.
– Colleen Shogan 2011 – The Senate’s Last Best Hope

2
By far the most significant anti-secrecy provision in the 1970 act dealt with
disclosure of House members’ votes in Committee of the Whole. The House o en
makes its most important policy decisions in that committee, but for 180 years its
precedents had forbidden the recording of names in these votes. Under the new
rule, each member’s name and vote was to be recorded upon the demand of 20 or
more members.
– Walter Kravitz 1990 – Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970

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
 Walter Kravitz 1990 – Legislative Reorganization Act 1970 2

2
It is somewhat surprising that “transparency”, one of modernity’s most
conspicuous current tropes, has received so little sustained analytic attention. All
the more so when we notice that, in the real world, modernity and transparency
rarely march hand in hand...To provide but one example, the IMF, in the interests of
promoting democracy, has continually insisted on radical economic restructuring
across the globe, calling for the decentralisation and privatisation of staterun
enterprises. In persistently asking probing questions about who controls what
economic resources, to what ends and for whose benefit, developers aim to make
visible an underlying market-run rationality, to make “transparent” the everyday
workings of local and global economies.
– Todd Sanders 2003 – Invisible Hands and Visible Goods

 2
If the United States is to correct the harm caused by the recent secrecy
culture, advocates who favor greater government openness must acknowledge
that there are legitimate secrets. Transparency proponents must better understand
the rationales for legitimate secrets.
– Frederick Schwarz 2015 – Democracy in the Dark

3
Transparency is one of the buzzwords of the 21st century (at least in political
economy). Whether we are talking about good governance at home or exporting
democratic ideals abroad, the new conventional wisdom is “the more
transparency, the better.” I argue that, under many conditions, secrecy can be
efficient from a social welfare point of view… The diversity of interests in
democracies results in a strategic situation in which individual interest groups have
incentives to engage in behavior that may prevent social improvements… Like
Sunstein, I come to the conclusion that shielding representatives from “constituent
pressures, including interest groups, in the hope that they will deliberate more
effectively on the public good” (1985: 34-5) is also optimal under certain
conditions… The main point of this paper is that transparency is not always good;
rather, it is a variable of institutional design and should be treated as such. At the
least, we are forced to consider that, like most conventional wisdom, the choice
between secrecy and transparency is more complicated than we think.
– Barbara Koremenos 2010 – Open Covenants, Clandestinely Arrived At

3
The Founders faced a paradox at the heart of democracy. For the government
to be effective, it needs to be able to act secretly—in some cases, to protect
democracy from its enemies, both external and internal...Congress exercises
oversight over the executive’s secret activities, including military and intelligence
actions. But it cannot do so publicly without compromising those very activities,
and so instead a limited number of lawmakers receive secret briefings on a regular
basis...The normal means for deterring government abuse—oversight,
transparency, institutional competition—are inconsistent with the premise that
secrecy is necessary.
– Eric Posner 2013 – Before You Reboot (New Republic)

 3
The question raises a real paradox. If government can keep secrets, then the
public cannot hold it to account for its actions. But if government cannot keep
secrets, then many programs - including highly desirable ones - are impossible.
– Eric Posner 2013 – The Secrecy Paradox

3
The reform of longest lasting significance provided that House votes in the
Committee of the Whole be recorded on request, which ended the secrecy o en
surrounding members’ votes on important measures.
– David King 1995 – Encyclopedia of the US Congress

3
Many liberals believe that an unfair and corrupt political system controlled by
privileged interests represents the chief obstacle to the realization of an otherwise
popular le -wing agenda. Enacting reforms to the electoral and legislative process,
they argue, would effectively remove this barrier, quickly producing a decisive
le ward shi in the trajectory of national policy. Yet history does not support this
view. Liberals in the 1970s also believed that institutions were holding back the
advancement of their favored policies. They sought and achieved reforms in
campaign finance, party nominations, government transparency, and
congressional organization that were designed to depose moderate and
conservative Democratic leaders while bolstering the influence of liberal activists
at the expense of “establishment” interest groups. Rather than usher in a period of
ambitious liberal achievements, these reforms in fact coincided with the close of
an era of le -of-center policy change.
– Grossman & Hopkins 2005 – The Liberal Failure of Political Reform

3
If legislators had been personally opposed to tax reform, all they had to do
was insist that the sun must shine on any tax bill, knowing that sunshine would
have destroyed tax reform.
– Arnold 1990 – The Logic of Congressional Action

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Consider how the Senate Finance Committee handled the Tax Reform Act of
1986. At first it held its markup sessions in a huge hearing room, where lobbyists
could watch every decision and every vote. Quite predictably committee members
voted to save most tax preferences, and even invent some new ones. Eventually
senators decided to abandon all public sessions and to dra a new reform plan in
total secrecy. All of a sudden the special interests were at a serious disadvantage,
for they could no longer see who was responsible for terminating their favorite tax
provisions.
– Douglas Arnold 1990 – The Logic of Congressional Action

3
For every example...where transparency seemed to produce more
accountable and effective governance — there is another where transparency
either had no effect or produced a backlash that further insulated public officials
from accountability to citizens.
– Kosack & Fung 2013 – Does Transparency Improve Governance?

3
Just making important data available won’t cause political change. Justice
Brandeis’s clever aphorism to the contrary, sunlight is not in fact the best
disinfectant; actual disinfectant is. Sunlight just makes it easier for people to look
at the pus.
– Aaron Swartz 2006 – Disinfecting the Sunlight

3
Every negotiation consists of stages and a result; if the stages become
matters of public controversy before the result has been achieved, the negotiation
will almost certainly founder. A negotiation is the subject of concession and
counter-concession: if the concession offered is divulged before the public are
aware of the corresponding concession to be received, extreme agitation may
follow and the negotiation may have to be abandoned.
– Sir Harold Nicolson 1953 – The Evolution of Diplomatic Method

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Secrecy has an ancient tradition in diplomacy...the secret formed the
undisputed paradigm of international negotiation, both for its process as for its
result: it is in all legitimacy that secret deals led to treaties intended to remain
secret...Pecquet devotes a complete section of his opus (How much secrecy is
necessary for success) to secrecy; like any political action, a negotiation can be
jeopardized because third parties will have heard of it: “whoever lacks secrecy
destroys his work while building it.” (1737: 35) – “quiconque manque au secret
détruit son ouvrage en même temps qu’il l’édifie.”...There appear three distinct and
successive fonfigurations of international negotiation: that in which the process as
the result of the negotiation is secret; then the one where the process remains
secret but the result is supposed to be public; finally, the one – today – where an
injunction of transparency weighs on both the process and the result.
– Aurélien Colson 2009 – La négociation diplomatique au risque de la
transparence

3
It’s hard to think of any good examples of transparency work accomplishing
anything, except perhaps for more transparency.
– Swartz 2006 – When is Transparency Useful?

3
Because of familiar collective action problems, well-organized groups, who
monitor legislative activity closely, are much better situated than the mass
electorate to secure real accountability from incumbent legislators. And these
groups have more resources for demanding accountability; they have not just
individual votes with which to threaten lawmakers, but the ability to aggregate
many votes and to withhold or deploy resources like lobbyist assistance,
contributions, and the threat of independent spending. Unorganized groups do not
enjoy these advantages and o en lack the ability even to push their issues on to
the agenda. All of this suggests that the rhetoric of widespread accountability may
obscure the reality of too much accountability for some and not enough for many.
– Jane Schacter 2006 – Political Accountability

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Given members’ contention that a main reason for closed committee
sessions was to bar lobbyists, it was no surprise that Ways and Means was the one
panel that had unquestionably retreated from openness. With wide-ranging
authority over taxes, trade, Social Security, health and welfare programs, it was
perhaps the most heavily lobbied committee in the House.
         Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., asked critics of closed sessions,
“Are you disappointed in the legislation that’s come out of the Ways and Means
Committee?”
         Many conceded they were not. “I hate to say it, but members are more willing
to make tough decisions on controversial bills in closed meetings,” said Democrat
Don J. Pease of Ohio, a former newspaper editor who usually cast the only vote
against closing Ways and Means sessions. “In a closed meeting, you can come out
and say, ‘I fought like a tiger for you in there, but I lost.’”
         Representatives of the self-described citizens’ lobby, Common Cause, which
campaigned for the open-meetings rules approved by the House in 1973 and the
Senate in 1975, also recognized that closed sessions, particularly in Ways and
Means, at times produced legislation less weighted with special-interest
provisions. By 1987, the group had stopped monitoring committees to see which
were closing meetings and had stopped protesting when they found violations.
– Jaqueline Calmes 1987 – CQ – Fading Sunshine Reforms

3
Most senators seem to agree that the recent changes in the rules (political
action committees, increased roll-call voting and open meetings) have made
negotiation and political self-sacrifice infinitely more difficult. Open meetings are
singled out most o en… “There was an enormous give and take,” Pearson [former
Senator James B. Pearson, Republican from Kansas] says of the old closed-door
committee system. “People could change their minds – as a result of hard
bargaining and deliberation. But nobody wants to admit in public that he was
wrong.”
– Alan Ehrenhalt 1982 – CQ – Team Spirit of Days Gone By Evades the Senate

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Even if voters were smothered with “costless” information, it is doubtful that
they would pay attention and process detailed information about the complexities
of public policy they do not care much about. In contrast, special interests are
“naturally” better informed; compared to the general public, they get costless
information as a by-product of their specialized activities, and they have stronger
incentives to invest in costly information gathering, to pay costly attention to
complex information, and to invest in costly expertise that allows them to
understand such information.
– Susanne Lohmann 1998 – Information Rationale For the Power of Special
Interests

3
Institutional design might fail to increase accountability if it overlooks the
fact that even behind closed doors, the actors might attempt to conceal their
position, in particular when they negotiate.
– Stephanie Novak 2015 – Secrecy and Publicity

3
Publicity does not necessarily increase accountability.
– Novak 2015 – How Publicity Creates Opacity

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A representative of a member state X explained that (negative) votes trigger
media attention while journalists usually overlook measures adopted without
opposition.
– Novak 2015 – How Publicity Creates Opacity

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Forcing the publication of votes in an institutional setting that relies on
diplomatic practices can have deleterious effects on accountability: In some cases,
the publication of votes might operate as a window-dressing device, prompting the
public belief that ministers are accountable since they publish their votes, while
real monitoring of the decision makers’ stances is not possible.
– Novak 2015 – How Publicity Creates Opacity

3
Decision makers used to voice their disagreement more frequently when they
knew their votes would not be published.
– Novak 2015 – Secrecy and Publicity

3
The publication of votes – which was supposed to increase the accountability
of ministers- actually became an additional incentive for opponents to silence
themselves and join the majority.
– Novak 2015 – Secrecy and Publicity

3
Interviews reveal that the different actors in the legislative process make
strategic use of transparency rules over the course of negotiations. In some cases,
actors tend to convert transparency rules as they use publicity to put pressure on
their opponents.
– Novak 2013 – Transparency as Organized Hypocrisy

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Perhaps the most fundamental driver of this ideological dri , however, is the
most easily overlooked: the diminishing marginal returns to governmental
transparency. As public institutions became subject to more and more policies of
formal openness and accountability, demands for transparency became more and
more threatening to the functioning and legitimacy of those institutions and,
consequently, to progressive political agendas.
– David Pozen 2018 – Transparency’s Ideological Dri

3
A growing body of empirical evidence and analysis points to the mixed results
of transparency and accountability initiatives (TAIs) in terms of improved
outcomes. For all of the widely touted success stories, similar interventions have
had poor results or even negative consequences in other contexts. For example,
participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has resulted in increased
investment in services for the poor (Ackerman 2004), but it has not been
successfully replicated elsewhere (Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva 2011). Social audits in
the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh have contributed to combating corruption;
however, they have been largely unsuccessful in the state of Bihar (Srinivasan and
Park 2013; Dutta and others 2014). In Uganda, community scorecards for health
services helped reduce under-5 mortality by one-third (Bjorkman and Svensson
2009), but community monitoring of health providers in Sierra Leone had limited
results in light of accountability gaps up the chain of command (Grandvoinnet,
Aslam, and Raha 2015). Interpreted from the perspective of this Report, TAIs seek
to reshape the policy arena by enhancing contestability and, when successful,
effectively changing the incentives of decision makers in favor of certain outcomes.
– Grandvoinnet 2017 – Transparency to Accountability (World Bank)

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The United States is an especially interesting example of how transparency
complicates political bargaining. Committee meetings in the House of
Representatives and the Senate were long held behind closed doors, but in the
1970s, procedural changes adopted by the House and the Senate opened
committee meetings to the public and the press ( – Rieselbach 1994). There are
strong indications that these procedural changes had detrimental effects on
lawmaking, reducing the willingness of House members and senators to seek
political compromises. Ehrenhalt (1982) (cited in Warren & Mansbridge 2013 –
Political Negotiation) argues that the new rules “made negotiation and political
self-sacrifice infinitely more difficult” and Binder and Lee (2015, 253) argue that the
“move toward greater transparency in congressional operations” has become a
“double-edged sword,” offering several examples of how transparency has undone
negotiations over important policy decisions in Congress.
– Lindvall 2017 – Reform Capacity

3
There is one more type of cost that is le to discuss: the audience costs that
decision-makers suffer if agents outside the political decision-making process –
such as interest organizations and important groups of voters react negatively to
the deals that political decision-makers are striking. In political science, the term
“audience costs” was first used in the field of international relations, referring to
costs that” arise from the action of domestic audiences concerned with whether
the [country’s] leadership is successful or unsuccessful at foreign policy” (Fearon
1994, 577), but I am using it here in the context of domestic politics, referring to the
potential consequences of having groups that are not involved in the bargaining
process witnessing the bargaining process itself (as opposed to the outcome of the
bargaining process) (see Groseclose and McCarty 2001). Audience costs are likely to
be lower – and reform capacity is likely to be higher – in systems where political
decision-makers can negotiate in secret. This may seem like a paradoxical
argument to make, since we typically think of openness and transparency as
virtues, not vices. But it is an argument that has been made before. If political
decision-makers face “audience costs,” they become reluctant to reveal
information and make arguments that they would have been happy to reveal and
make in secret communications.
– Lindvall 2017 – Reform Capacity
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[The scoring of public votes began as a] lobbying tactic with an electoral
edge, intended to produce legislative results by threatening hostile lawmakers with
the prospect of electoral retribution. Scorecards were meant to wean group
members off party labels as their sole guide in the voting booth, under the theory
that greater influence could be secured through nonpartisanship. Instead,
members should support a group’s true “friends”—lawmakers who reliably backed
favored measures, as shown by their record, not their rhetoric—and punish those
“enemies” who did not…Legislators did not take kindly to this scrutiny and its
coercive flavor. They “looked upon it as black-listing,” she explains. Some rank-
and-file members were also troubled by its imperative quality regarding their own
vote.

ADA and ACA scores have been heavily utilized in political science as proxies for
liberalism and conservatism and used to demonstrate the growing polarization of
the congressional parties. Archival evidence suggests, however, that those scores
were intended to create the very phenomenon they have been used to measure.
They were deeply political rather than objective metrics, which the ADA and ACA
used to guide their electoral activities in accordance with an increasingly partisan
strategic plan. Each group directed campaign resources toward incumbent
lawmakers they rated highly, but they did so unevenly—with the ADA favoring
liberal Democrats over Republicans and the ACA showing a preference for
conservative Republicans over time. By rewarding favored lawmakers in their
preferred party, and using scores to highlight and discourage ideological outliers,
they hoped to reshape the parties along more distinct and divided ideological
lines.
– Emily Charnock 2018 – Interest Group Ratings

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A main reason for adopting secrecy…has always been the desire to protect
voters and jurors from bribery and intimidation. In his statistical analysis of the
adoption of the secret ballot in national elections, Przeworski finds that both the
extension of the suffrage and the introduction of the secret ballot seem to have
resulted from the elites yielding to revolutionary threats by the lower classes, but
to some extent also from the desire to protect opposition voters from intimidation
by incumbents…As Giannetti shows in her chapter, another effect is that deputies
cannot be held accountable by party leaders…Bentham defended the practice of
secret voting in the Polish parliament at a time when Poland was under Russian
domination. Under certain conditions, it may be more important to prevent an
autocrat from punishing representatives than to ensure that the voters can punish
them by non-reelection…
– Elster 2015 – Secrecy and Publicity

3
[In secret, closed-door sessions] opposing parties can share their
perspectives freely and come to understand the perspectives of others.
– Mark Warren & Jane Mansbridge 2013 – Political Negotiation (partisanship)

3
Transparency, disclosure and gaming by small cadres of organized actors can
go together. Need to consider the whole...I know of many cases where
transparency massively backfired. Without other institutions & safeguards, the
powerful can benefit more.
– Tufekci 2017 – Transparency and Disclosure

3
A good two-minute speech can, and o en does, take a half-hour for a
politician with a national television audience.
– Senator Dale Bumpers 1999 – How Sunshine Harmed Congress

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It is not difficult to understand why the concept of secret deliberations, out of
earshot of the King, would have special appeal in the colonial assemblies, the
Continental Congress, the Congress of the Confederation and the Federal
Convention to frame the Constitution. And, indeed, it was frequently utilized in all
of these legislative assemblies in early American history.
– Wolfensberger 1992 – Committees of the Whole

3
A healthy debate on this topic is long overdue. There is shockingly little
empirical research to date in political science about transparency, open meeting
laws, disclosure rules and related topics.
– Fukuyama 2015 – The Limits of Transparency

3
The main case against excessive transparency is simple and has three
components. First, it undercuts deliberation (have you seen many reasoned open
debates in Congress lately?); second, the kinds of disclosure and compliance rules
we impose on public officials deters many good people from entering government,
and imposes huge burdens on those who do; and finally, it makes very difficult the
kind of deal-making that our decentralized system of budgeting requires.
– Fukuyama 2015 – The Limits of Transparency

3
The Commons met in secret… and without fear of the King freely exchanged
its views respecting supplies (claiming that the reason for secrecy in legislatures
was to remove the intimidating pressure of the King).
– Wolfensberger 1992 – Committees of the Whole

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3
What I did was politics. And to do politics you have to have rooms where what
goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas. And then you take it out of the room and you either
sell it (present the final legislation) and you either succeed or you fail. But unless
you have a deliberative space which is safe, you can’t do what you were sent there
to do…Transparency takes us to trust and it takes us to actually what
representative democracy is.
– Ignatieff 2014 – Tensions in Transparency (Harvard talk)

3
If legislators hide their tracks by delegating authority to the executive, by
combining all actions into a single omnibus bill, by meeting behind closed doors,
or by acting without a recorded vote, then citizens cannot reward or punish their
legislators for their individual actions. In contrast, if legislators are forced to take
public positions on specific programs, citizens can hold their legislators
accountable for the positions they take.
– Arnold 1990 – The Logic of Congressional Action

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Even when everyone involved had only the best of intentions, being
observed distorted behavior instead of improving it. My findings...suggest that
more-transparent environments are not always better. Privacy is just as essential
for performance...Total transparency heightens the risk that our irreverence will
come back to haunt us—and thus has a chilling effect on experimentation. It it’s
also critical for leaders to mitigate transparency with zones of privacy, enabling
just the right amount of deviance to foster innovation and productivity.
– Bernstein 2014 – The Transparency Trap

3
Whether the vote-buying or vote-options approach is used, presumably
legislators get paid sufficiently, through some combination of carrots and sticks.
– King & Zeckhauser 2003 – Vote Buying Requires Transparency

3
When votes look as though they may be close, clever leaders seek out those
members, o en cross-pressured already, whose votes might be tipped in their
direction most cheaply. Leaders then induce them-through compromises, side
payments, and threats – to pledge their votes should they be needed.
– King & Zeckhauser 2003 – Vote-Buying Requires Transparency

3
Arguing in front of a public would rarely result in a true dialogue, but more
likely lead to ritualistic rhetoric and purely strategic arguing.
– Ulbert, Risse, Müller 2004 – Arguing and Bargaining

3
Arguing geared to a reasoned consensus is more likely in private in-camera
settings and behind closed doors given the considerable risks which actors face
when they expose their interests or even identities to arguing.
– Ulbert, Risse, Müller 2004 – Arguing and Bargaining

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All laws are born of negotiations. The settings and contexts for these
negotiations contrast sharply with those for labor leaders and business executives,
who are usually blessed with quiet negotiation rooms, reasonably unified
principals, and the task of completing deals one at a time. Politicians o en
negotiate in a bubble, with interests groups and the media watching...Votes are
visible and easily monitored by principals, but the art of negotiation lies strongly in
shaping legislation before a vote.
– King & Zeckhauser 2002 – Punching and Counter-Punching in the U.S.
Congress

3
Revealing the agent’s action leads to conformism. (A great description of
partisanship)
– Andrea Prat 2005 – The Wrong Kind of Transparency

3
The concepts of transparency and accountability are closely linked:
transparency is supposed to generate accountability. This article questions this
widely held assumption. Transparency mobilizes the power of shame, yet the
shameless may not be vulnerable to public exposure. Truth o en fails to lead to
justice.
– Jonathan Fox 2007 – Uncertain Relationship

3
We should avoid the common habit of thinking of individuals as the principal
users and beneficiaries of transparency. Instead, professionals and organizations
o en constitute the most important users of public disclosures.
– Fung 2013 – Infotopia

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Lobbyists learn about legislators. They study their biographies, their voting
records, and the predilections of their constituents. They examine members’ policy
agendas and how they may be changing, their political situation, their
constituents’ views on issues, and the strength (and identity) of their likely
opposition in the next election. They scour such vital information as the legislator’s
religious affiliation, previous employment, and spouse’s name and occupation, all
in an effort to understand how best to persuade the legislator. Federal Elections
Commission records and financial disclosure forms provide names of contributors
and personal information (such as stocks owned and clubs joined) that can aid the
lobbyist in finding ways to influence the member. Lobbyists target members for
lobbying by identifying key “swing” votes: legislators who are capable of being
persuaded. They then use voting records, election statistics, public statements,
and information about the member and the district to find the right “hook” to
persuade the right member, including grassroots mobilization that reinforces their
inside lobbying efforts.
– Rubin 2000 – Guide to Politics in America

3
First, the actual evidence on transparency’s impacts on accountability is not
as strong as one might expect. Second, the explanations of transparency’s impacts
are not nearly as straightforward as the widely held, implicitly self-evident answer
to the ‘why’ question would lead one to expect. To evoke the power of sunshine is
both intuitive and convincing. Indeed, these principles have guided my past 15
years’ work. Nevertheless, recently, a er reviewing the empirical evidence for the
assumed link between transparency and accountability, I have come to the
conclusion that one does not necessarily lead to the other.
– Fox 2007 – Uncertain Relationship

3
Reputational concerns lead to the loss of socially valuable information.
– Morris 2001 – Political Correctness

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Transparency on action can induce the agent to disregard useful private
information and act in a conformist manner. As a consequence, the principal can
be better off by committing not to observe the action.
– Patacconi & Vikander 2013 – On Management of Public Opinion
(referring to work of Andrea Prat)

3
The big problem with congressional capacity is that voters hate it – they don’t
hate the idea of Congress being well informed, but they hate the idea of members
spending money on themselves...And if you ever live in a swing district, you can
hear whatever you want about policy issues, but two weeks before the election,
every palm card that comes home, “Look how much money he spent on his own
salary, or look what he did” And constituents just hate the idea of members of
Congress spending any money on themselves. And so, members are loath to take
any votes that show them spending any money on their own salary, on their
staff salaries, on fixing up the hill, or anything like that. I was a staffer at leg
branch appropriations. And this was a horrible mess, trying to get members and
the capital complex would be crumbling, and members would say “We got to do
something about this, but...ugh...can we make it really invisible so I don’t have
to show people I voted for this.” And so that’s a huge problem....One way that
members can compensate their staff more without having to take any tough votes,
is by putting more staff benefits off budget....With that said, I don’t think there’s a
huge appetite on the hill to follow through on radically increasing staff or salary.

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