European Union legislative negotiations, transparency in decision making, and democratic oversight

Transparency in negotiations is thought to facilitate accountability as it provides information to outside observers about how state representatives act during negotiations. In the European Union (EU) context, transparency is complicated by the fact that negotiations take place in a multilingual environment. If records are not available in a language that outside observers understand, then they do not enhance accountability practices. Despite the centrality of translation capacity to the assessment of transparency, the current literature ignores this fact. This study examines the determinant of language-specific transparency in the Council of Ministers by combining new data on language-specific record availability with an updated dataset on EU legislative decision-making (DEU III) to address this gap in the literature. We show that transparency has decreased over time due to an increase in the number of official EU languages and a simultaneous cap on the overall budget allocated for record translation. This has led to differences in transparency across languages. We also demonstrate that member-state specific utility outcomes tend not to influence language-specific transparency, but that certain types of negotiations are prioritised for translation. Our findings speak to the literatures on legislative politics, transparency in decision-making, and democratic oversight at the EU level.