Transparency: New Trends and Consequences in Legislative Politics

• In Event: Legislatures and Leaders: New Perspectives on Political Institutions

Abstract

Have legislative politics become more or less transparent in recent years? Two major transformations in politics in the past 15 years could lead one to expect that transparency in legislative policy-making should have increased: 1) Advancements in new technologies for automatically recording, storing and communicating legislative processes and outcomes; 2) public awareness and new initiatives regarding enhanced public access to law-making. Against this background, this paper investigates the degree to which transparency has in fact increased, or if the transparency ‘wave’ has had little real effect on legislative policy-making. We focus our analysis on the particular question of the public’s access to information regarding legislative activities in national parliaments around the world. Our data shows that while many countries have indeed introduced important transparency initiatives in legislative decision-making, the substance and coverage of these initiatives vary greatly. This paper provides an overview of the trends as well as an in-depth analysis of three kinds of transparency in particular: 1) the publication of legislative decision records in national parliaments; 2) the recording of individual votes by elected representatives in policy-making; 3) public access to deliberation and votes in parliamentary committees.

Authors

• Sara Hagemann, London School of Economics

• Dan Berliner, London School of Economics