The Transparency of Democracy

Abstract

Perhaps it is no surprise that when interviewing AMs, their staff, and civil servants about the National Assembly’s stated commitment to transparent governance, the consistent response to my question, “What is your opinion of the Assembly’s Open Government Policy?,” was one in favor of openness in government. Who could question the value of transparency in politics, after all? Nonetheless, this question encouraged a variety of interpretations about what transparency means that further informed discussions about its limits. Some described openness as a new procedure of “stakeholder involvement” in policymaking (i.e., including civil society in decision-making processes initiated by the Welsh Assembly Government), which set politics in Wales apart from politics in the UK as a whole (see Egan and James 2002). Others took it to mean a practice of cross-party collaboration in policy development, another design feature of devolution. A few dismissed openness as a consequence of the National Assembly’s lack of power relative to the House of Commons and the European Commission: as one political staffer put it to me, “It’s easy to have open government when you’re not debating anything [of importance]” (Interview March 29, 2003). Interviewees were also divided between taking “openness” to mean the transparency of parliamentary activity before the public at large or the transparency of government activity before nonministerial AMs.