Transparency actually: how transparency affects public perceptions of political decision-making

Abstract

Building on a widely held account of transparency as integral to legitimate and successful governance, this article addresses the question of how transparency in decision-making can influence public perceptions of political decision-making. An original experiment with 1099 participants shows that people who perceive political decision-making to be transparent judge the degree of procedural fairness highly and are more willing to accept the final decision. Perceptions of transparency are, however, largely shaped by transparency cues (e.g. statements provided by external sources) rather than by the degree of actual transparency, and no direct effect of actual transparency can be found on decision acceptance. The implication is that it is difficult to influence people's acceptance of political decisions by means of transparency reforms, as people base their assessments of political decisions largely on considerations other than evalutations of actual decision-making procedures.

Policy Area as a Potential Moderator of Transparency Effects: An Experiment

“…The question of why transparency does not seem to be the obvious prescription against declining public trust and legitimacy that democratic theories suggest has recently received increasing scholarly interest. For example, empirical studies have shown that the initial level of trust and knowledge affects how people experience transparency (Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer ), that people from different cultures tend to react differently to transparency (Grimmelikhuijsen et al ), and that there is a translation problem between actual decision‐making procedures and public perceptions of procedures that makes transparency less efficient in improving the public's legitimacy beliefs (de Fine Licht ).…”

From Access to Documents to Consumption of Information: The European Commission Transparency Policy for the TTIP Negotiations

“…This is warranted as the number of published documents does not automatically reflect the actual amount of information available (Cross, 2014;Curtin & Meijer, 2006). A purely quantitative perspective does not allow for drawing conclusions on democratic legitimacy resulting from transparency, as this would assume an 'automatic link' between the amount of information available on the one hand, and legitimacy of decision-making outcomes and public perception of transparency on the other (Brandsma, 2012;De Fine Licht, 2014;Naurin, 2007). For instance, in searching a balance between the need for democratic scrutiny and need for secrecy, giving 'MEPs privileged access to documents [can] alleviate accusations of a democratic deficit while accommodating the need for secrecy' (Abazi, 2016; see also Rosén & Stie, 2017, in this issue).…”

Information is Power: Public Disclosure of Information in the Planning Decision-Making Process

“…and do not make an independent evaluation of the information at hand' (de Fine Licht, 2014, p. 325). This can be achieved without recourse to the actual information but instead by the perceived credibility of the source that is stating that a procedure is transparent (de Fine Licht, 2014).…”

“…Those 'gated' from the information are therefore required to trust that the planning authority is acting appropriately when withholding information. For this trust to be established, a normative view would be that the procedures on which the decision is made need to be transparent so that the decision is perceived and accepted as legitimate (de Fine Licht, 2014).…”