Why Representative Democracies Can't Write Off Transparency

Interest groups from the NRA to the Sierra Club show the power of information to motivate citizens.

This week, arguing that “transparency is overrated,” Amitai Etzioni presented a familiar critique. In his telling, transparency is ineffective because people cannot or do not act on disclosed information in ways that affect real policy outcomes. What he misses is that disclosure occurs within an ecosystem of interest groups and advocacy organizations that remix, repackage, and redistribute information once it is released. This civil-society context in which data is released significantly affects the effectiveness transparency can have.

According to Etzioni, transparency is vastly oversold because it implicitly relies on a “naïve” theory of direct democracy in which voters learn about, evaluate and signal their preferences on specific government programs and outcomes. “To put this objection in the language of political science,” he summarizes, “Our government is—and must be—not a direct democracy, but a representative one. All we can do is judge whether, in general, taking into consideration all the various votes our representative has cast, we approve or disapprove.”

On its surface, this critique is compelling: Voting is, indeed, a very thin signal of preferences, and it is true that most “people do not have the training necessary to parse and evaluate the mountains of data.” But this does not condemn transparency to the ignominious fate he indicates. Rather, it suggests an additional piece of the puzzle that he ignores: interest groups as intermediaries.