Transparency & Legislative Behavior

Abstract

How does transparency affects the behavior of legislators? Specifically, are representatives' proposals and decisions more public-serving when the policy making process is more visible to the public than when it is less so? How does transparency affect constituents' ability and inclination to punish self-serving behavior and reward public-serving behavior by representatives?

Good-government reformers and many (but not all) theorists of representation share an intuition that by facilitating monitoring, transparency mitigates politicians' pursuit of self-interest at the expense of some broader conception of the public good, and so improves the quality of representation. Testing this proposition empirically is difficult, however, because non-transparent legislative procedures are, by definition, unobservable. This project uses experimental methods to compare legislative proposals and decisions, as well as legislators' accountability to the public, in bargaining environments where levels of transparency systematically vary.

The experiment is a repeated game in which Legislators propose and vote on a budget that can be divided among themselves as well as the Public; and the Public, in turn, rewards or punishes the Legislators. Preliminary runs of the experiment in a laboratory setting suggested important effects of varying transparency on how public-serving budgets are, as well as on the mechanics of legislative accountability. However, subsequent runs of a very similar experiment, using a web-based platform, do not replicate many the initial laboratory results, leaving conclusions about the impact of transparency ambiguous. The basic experiment offers a range of opportunities for extensions that would vary the legislator-constituent relationship as well as participants’ control over the transparency conditions.

Keywords: transparency, experiment, legislatures, legislative voting, accountability

JEL Classification: D72