Transparency and the Ethics of Communication

Transparency is widely supposed to make institutions and their officeholders both more trustworthy and more trusted. Yet in the United Kingdom many institutions and office-holders on whom transparency requirements have been imposed across the last fifteen years are now seen as less trustworthy, and are apparently less trusted than they were before the requirements were introduced. Does this suggest that transparency does not improve trustworthiness? Or that it increases trustworthiness without increasing trust? Or is the supposed evidence for declining trustworthiness and declining trust misleading? How confident can we be that transparency supports either trustworthiness or trust? Government, corporations, and their critics seemingly converge in seeing transparency as indispensable for accountability and good governance, for preventing corruption and improving performance, and for increasing trustworthiness and trust. But does transparency have these desirable effects? Transparency requirements may fail to improve either trustworthiness or trust because they set a one-sided standard for public, corporate, or other communication. Although transparency demands too little for effective communication, it is an effective antidote to secrecy.

Beyond Exchanging First Principles? Some Closing Comments

This concluding chapter explores four issues. First, what have we learned about transparency and how has it changed? Second, what seems to affect transparency – what accounts for growth or decline in the phenomenon? Third, what does transparency itself affect – what does it do to organizations or to society more generally? Last, what normative view should we take of transparency? Transparency differs from other closely related concepts, particularly openness and freedom of information. What might have been discussed or labelled as accountability, openness, or due process a generation ago may now be talked of as ‘transparency’, but that relabelling might have no deeper significance except to students of the rise and fall of fashionable words and phrases. If the optimistic view of the effects of transparency provisions is that government ministers and bureaucracies adopt a culture of openness, citizens end up knowing more, and trust in democratic government goes up, the data available for assessing such a view are patchy and hard to interpret.

Varieties of Transparency

Although the purpose of this chapter is to construct an anatomy of transparency, it is essential to address the triangular relationship between transparency, openness, and surveillance. The first question is whether a clear distinction can be drawn between transparency and openness. The second question concerns the relationship between transparency/openness and surveillance. This chapter examines transparency, focusing on directions and varieties of transparency and how they interact with their habitat and with each other. It distinguishes four directions of transparency and maps its varieties. The chapter also emphasizes the importance of examining the habitats within which transparency operates. Finally, it draws some brief conclusions, stressing the implications of the analysis for the measurement of transparency. The aim is to identify different directions and varieties of transparency in relatively neutral terms. Abstracting from the issue of direction, transparency can be analysed by means of a set of three dichotomies: event transparency versus process transparency; transparency in retrospect versus transparency in real time; and nominal transparency versus effective transparency.

Varieties of Software and their Implications for Effective Democratic Government

As governmental processes and judgments become increasingly digital, the transparency of digital systems that implement the processes of government becomes increasingly important. Open code is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for maintaining transparency as democracy becomes digitized, and complete openness of process is not appropriate for every domain. This chapter explores some of the complexities in the relationship between openness of code and democratic government. Computer code controls and enables the actions of users, and for users to have true autonomy they must be able to examine, alter, and redistribute the code. A key issue for transparency is the degree to which this observation applies to the activities of government that are embedded in computer code. Free software creates a fundamentally different market structure than closed code. The philosophy of free software argues that the inability to view code that implements governance suggests totalitarian and Kafkaesque control, a constraining complex network of rules and regulations.

Transparency in Historical Perspective

Transparency is a term that has attained quasi-religious significance in debate over governance and institutional design. Today, it is pervasive in the jargon of business governance as well as that of governments and international bodies, and has been used almost to saturation point in all of those domains over the past decade. This chapter maps out some of the different strains and meanings of the term and doctrine. Like many other notions of a quasi-religious nature, transparency is more often preached than practised, more often invoked than defined, and indeed might ironically be said to be mystic in essence, at least to some extent. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham seems to have been the first to use ‘transparency’ in its modern governance-related sense in English. The chapter also discusses transparency in international governance, transparency in national and sub-national government, and transparency and corporate governance.

Transparency and Digital Government

Digital government refers to the use by government of information and communication technology, including the Internet, both internally and to interact with citizens, businesses, and other governments. This chapter briefly outlines the development of digital government. It suggests three key ways in which digital government could be more transparent than government of the ‘pre-digital’ era and three ways in which it might become less transparent. The chapter goes on to identify some ways in which these ‘barriers’ to transparency might be overcome, such as the use of electronic tools like search engines and software. Finally, it discusses the strong variations in the potential for digitally aided transparency across countries, within countries, and within groups of Internet users and non-users. Some non-democratic states have resisted the potential of e-government to promote transparency, and have been more interested in trying to restrict usage of the Internet within their boundaries. This chapter investigates some of these variations in digitally aided transparency.

What Hope for Freedom of Information in the UK?

This chapter assesses freedom of information (FOI) in the United Kingdom. It discusses the terminology associated with FOI, namely, transparency and openness. FOI refers to access to non-personal information; the regulation of personal information is typically governed by privacy or data-protection laws. Some jurisdictions take an integrated approach to both categories of information, but this chapter focuses on information that does not relate primarily to the individual. The family of information statutes – encompassing FOI, privacy, official secrecy and the like – are known collectively as Access to Information laws. Finally, open government is a term close to openness, since both are concerned with systems and delivery.

The More Closely We Are Watched, the Better We Behave?

This chapter provides a brief survey of the economic literature on transparency. The conceptual tool used by economists is the principal-agent model, a game-theoretic setting in which transparency corresponds to the ability of the principal to observe what the agent does. Holmström (1979) provides a powerful and general rationale for full transparency. One can argue that the increase in accountability is not sufficient to offset other drawbacks such as the violation of privacy, the direct cost of disclosure, or the revelation of sensitive information. Alternatively, one can attack the link between transparency and accountability: it is not necessarily true that more disclosure makes the agent behave better. Holmström showed that, in a world of complete contracts, the more the principal knows about the agent, the better the agent behaves. Some objections to Holmström – the right to privacy, the direct cost of disclosure, the risk that hostile parties learn sensitive information – are perfectly valid, but they find limited application in politics, corporate governance, and other important areas.

Transparency as a Human Right

‘Transparency’, ‘openness’, and access to government-held information are widely applauded as remedies for the deficiencies and operations of government where government claims to be democratic but falls short of its rhetoric. This chapter examines whether transparency is a human right, focusing on one of its specific features: access to government information, or freedom of information (FOI). It explains what is meant by FOI and argues that within the framework of internationally agreed concepts of human rights, FOI deserves to be listed with those rights. Not only is FOI instrumental in realizing other human rights such as freedom of speech and access to justice, or other desiderata such as accountability, it is intrinsically important: the right to know how government operates on our behalf. The chapter also discusses constitutionalism and the struggle for information in the United Kingdom.

Does Transparency Make a Difference? The Example of the European Council of Ministers

In the panoply of European institutions that have been criticized for their secrecy and lack of accountability, the European Council of Ministers certainly ranks near the top of the list. However, others insist that the secrecy of the policy process within the European Union is exaggerated, and that the public already has access to plentiful information about decision making. This chapter examines empirical evidence that may be used to determine the extent to which secrecy of the EU Council of Ministers is costly or beneficial. It also discusses the effect of efforts made by the Council since 1993 to become more open in its proceedings. Though the focus of the chapter is on whether contributions of individual members of a decision-making body are observable, there are more basic levels of transparency that might be considered, in particular whether there is a ‘giving reasons requirement’, whereby a decision-making body is obliged to provide an explanation for its decisions.