How does full transparency of politicians' actions influence the quality of political representation?
Answers
Explanation:
Transparency in political decision-making is often proposed as a remedy to failures of the political agency. However, a small number of recent theoretical contributions (e.g. Prat 2005 or Fox 2007) discuss potential negative consequences of transparency in political decision-making on the quality of policy outcomes and representation of voter preferences, particularly when actions of politicians such as individual votes are recorded and made publicly available.
We (Stadelmann et al. 2014) try to identify the impact of transparency in political decision-making on the quality of political representation with a difference-in-difference strategy. The quality of political representation is measured by the observed divergence of parliamentary decisions from revealed voter preferences on identical issues. Full transparency of actions of individual politicians does not decrease divergence from voter preferences.