Transparency, Compromise and Accountability in Democratic Decision-making: How do these Imperatives Coexist in Representative Government?

The notions of transparency and compromise play a crucial role in our contemporary democracies. However, while transparency is usually considered to be a cornerstone of democratic accountability because it allows citizens to identify the delegates who are responsible for a decision (Przeworski, Stokes and Manin 2008), compromise-building seems to require private settings (Spörer-Wagner and Marcinkowski 2010). The goal of our paper is to explore the relationship between transparency, compromise and accountability in the context of democracy: To what extent is transparency, defined as an instrument to increase democratic accountability, compatible (or not) with compromise-building? If compromise is incompatible with transparency, can it still be reconciled with accountability? First, our contribution will explore the incompatibility between transparency and compromise by raising two questions: Do defining elements of transparency and compromise contradict each other? To answer this question, we analyse the two notions of transparency and compromise in order to identify their possible intrinsic incompatibilities. We then ask: what are the behavioural and often detrimental effects of transparency on the formation of compromise as explored in the literature? We will see that on the definitional and empirical levels, transparency and compromise appear to be barely compatible. Recent research has shown that transparency and accountability are not necessarily interconnected (Hood 2010). This assessment will lead us to investigate if and how, in the absence of transparency, compromise can be reconciled with democratic accountability. We will explore this second question from two angles. Compromise itself can be deemed to be incompatible with democratic paradigms, as supposed, for example, by Mouffe (1999). On the one hand, we will explore the theoretical underpinnings of this thesis and assess the extent to which the collision between compromise-building and accountability is at stake. We will see that criticisms of compromise as undemocratic barely invoke the lack of accountability. On the other hand, we will explore defences of compromise as a principle of representative government (Manin (1996); Gutmann and Thompson (2011)) and consider how these defences have conceived the possibility to hold compromise-builders accountable.