Amitai Etzioni

George Washington University

The Limits of Transparency

ransparency has long been a popular way

of governing in the United States. Recent
ideological and political developments have
further enhanced its popularity. However, it is a very
poor substitute for regulation. True, regulation poses
costs and raises normative issues of its own, hence it is
best used sparingly. However, when there are compelling reasons to advance a particular common good
say, climate control or public healthtransparency
can help regulation but cannot replace it.

and Regulatory Aairs, considers it a point of pride

that the Obama administration issued fewer regulations than any of his four predecessors. In a 2013
column for the Wall Street Journal, Sunstein decried
the red tape that characterizes regulation and that,
according to him, risks compromising economic
growth and job creation. In contrast, Sunstein has
been an outspoken advocate of greater transparency,
arguing that it ensures government accountability
while saving money.

Transparency is generally dened by political scientists

as the principle of enabling the public to gain information about the operations and structures of a given
entity. It is often considered synonymous with openness and disclosure. Moreover, political theorists as well
as public intellectuals and leaders have long viewed
transparency as an essential element of keeping the government accountable to the people, that is, of the democratic form of government. James Madison wrote that
any popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it is but a Prologue to a
Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Similar ideas are
found in the works of Locke, Mill, Rousseau, Bentham,
and Kant. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
famously declared that publicity is justly commended
as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight
is said to be the best of disinfectants.

The main reason transparency is vastly oversold is

that it rests on a popular but naive theory of the way
democracy functions, namely, that it operates as a
direct democracy. This theory assumes that voters can
learn about the ins and outs of the numerous programs
the government carries out or aects, evaluate them,
and determine which they favor or seek to discontinue. The problem with this theory is that most people are busy making a living and maintaining a family
and a social life, and they have very limited time and
energy to devote to following public aairs. And, as
studies reviewed in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel
laureate Daniel Kahneman (2011, 15758) show, people do not have the training necessary to evaluate the
relevant data. For example, some hospitals have rather
low mortality rates, but this can be attributable to the
fact that that they do not treat complicated cases or
that they transfer dying patients to hospices. A correct
evaluation requires taking into account all of these and
other variables rather than merely looking at the end
results. And how is the public to determine who is
behind the donations a politician collects from political action committees called All America, America
Works, and American Dream?

In recent decades, the support for regulation has

declined and the favor of transparency has increased as
a result of the laissez-faire conservative backlash to the
Great Society liberal era. Over the years that followed,
libertarian ideologies gained a sizeable following. At the
same time, transparency became popular on the left,
which promoted sunshine laws that required government meetings to be open to the public and the press.
The Barack Obama administration found it dicult
to promote much new regulation in the face of strong
conservative objections and often advanced transparency instead. Cass Sunstein, who served as administrator of the White House Oce of Information

For information to be accurate and accessible,

transparency requires the kind of regulation that
proponents claim it is supposed to replace. Without
government-mandated disclosure, most corporations have little reason to issue information that is
reliable, comprehensive, and readable. For example,
many online companies post their privacy policies.

Perspective

Amitai Etzioni is University Professor

at the George Washington University. He
taught at Columbia University, Harvard
University, and the University of California,
Berkeley. He served as president of the
American Sociological Association and
is author of several books, including The
Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics,
Modern Organizations, and A Comparative
Analysis of Complex Organizations. His
latest book, The New Normal: Life in Post
Affluence America, will be published by
Transaction Publishers in November 2014.
E-mail: etzioni@gwu.edu

Public Administration Review,

Vol. xx, Iss. xx, pp. xxxx. 2014 by
The American Society for Public Administration.
DOI: 10.1111/puar.12276.

The Limits of Transparency 1

However, these policies tend to be extremely dicult to understand.

The result is that transparency provides users with the illusion of
openness while actually serving to obfuscate.
Most important is the fact that even citizens dedicated to following
public aairs have but one vote. Most of the time, voters cannot
favor, say, more funding for climate change and less funding for
bombers (or any other such combination). Rather, all they can do
is vote up or down on their representative. All that voters can judge
is whether, in general, they approve or disapprove of the actions of
their elected ocials. Indeed, even keeping up with the numerous
positions an ocial has taken is beyond the capabilities of most people. They judge their representatives on the basis of whether they,
in general, align with their public philosophy. Or they are judged
regarding their position on a few issues that voters care about most,
such as abortion or Social Security.

Public Administration Review xxxx | xxxx 2014

In short, most times, the only eective way voters can hope to
get a handle on what troubles them is for their representatives to
regulate it (e.g., ensuring Wall Street will not again take risks that
will lead to taxpayer bailouts or limiting places one can smoke in
public). That means that these and many other problems cannot
be eectively treated by merely releasing information and leaving it up to the public to take action. Regulation can be costly,
and it is coercive. Therefore, it should not be applied unless
there are compelling reasons. However, when those are found,
transparency by itself often cannot ensure that what must be
done will be done.
References
Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Sunstein, Cass. 2013. The White House vs. Red Tape. Wall Street Journal, April 30.