Four Faces of Transparency in Democratic Theory

It is widely recognised that democracy cannot do without transparency. Yet at the same time it is thought that too much transparency can be corrosive of democracy. This may signal genuine conflicts, tensions and trade-offs. However, the problem may be at least partly conceptual. This paper aims to explore the complexities internal to the concept of transparency in its relation to democracy. The supposition is that there are a range of distinct reasons for valuing transparency, and these reasons in turn may have varying relationships with different underlying justifications of democracy itself. The resulting tensions may explain why practices of transparency can generate deep theoretical and practical tensions within democratic institutions. In this paper I aim to make a first step towards analysing the political value of transparency by drawing on canonical and contemporary political thought to trace four different problems to which transparency has been seen as a solution: (1) Corruption. Transparency here responds to a problem of corruption in both the narrow sense of abuse of private office for public gain, and in the broader sense of hidden connivances to shape and manipulate power in ways that escape popular control. This is perhaps the most well explored problem to which transparency is a response. (2) Knowledge. The second problem has to do with inefficiency, incompetence, and the errors that can come from ‘cloistered experts’ monopolising knowledge, excluding relevant information, resisting feedback, and acting in their institutional self-interest. (3) Coercion. Here transparency is a response to anxiety about the exercise of coercive power by majorities in the name of direct control to achieve specific ends. Transparency in this line of thought can work as a way to shift responsibility to individuals, to harness market mechanisms to achieve public ends, and may be associated with a shift from government to governance. (4) Exclusion. A fourth problem is the lack of effective opportunities for those affected by collective decisions to participate in making and shaping them. Demands for transparency here may be associated with appeals to directness, immediacy and responsiveness in relations of representation. By separating out these different ways in which transparency can be embedded within different ways of problematizing democratic politics we will be in a better position to see what, if anything, the different rationales for transparency have in common, where they overlap in their underlying conceptions of democracy and power in complex societies, and where and why they pull in different directions. Through this theoretical work I hope to create a clearer conceptual basis for addressing practical questions about when, where, and how demands, practices and ideals of transparency are supportive or corrosive of democratic goods.