The principle that government—not just its laws and policies, but the reasons and processes of decisions that generated those policies and the flows of money that fund their implementation—should be open seems not just unobjectionable, but an essential component of democratic government. Without that freedom of information, citizens cannot hold their government accountable, evaluate officials’ claims, and hold them responsible when they veer too far from the tether of democracy.
This reasoning becomes problematic when transparency focuses primarily—or even exclusively—on accountability. Campaign finance disclosure, contracting disclosure, and much of the freedom of information activity aims to create a “gotcha” game in which the information provided by open government measures is used by journalists, advocacy groups of the right and left, and political opponents to catch official wrongdoing. This cat-and-mouse game forms a civic check-and-balance mechanism that is fundamental to curbing the misbehavior of the powerful. In this regard, our society is fortunately blessed with many independent journalists whose personal interests and professional ethos press them to sniff out official malfeasance. The American public, going back to the time of Tocqueville and before, have had a skeptical strain in their view of government, particularly the possibilities of malfeasance. When pollsters asked whether “this country is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves” or whether it is run “for the benefit of all the people” in 2004, 54% of respondents thought that it was run by a few big interests.[125] Open government efforts can thus plug into a media apparatus and public political culture that together make a very effective “gotcha” machine.
But the larger responsibility of citizens is not just to judge when officials behave badly, but also to provide feedback on their performance in more nuanced ways, including registering approval when government performs well—when it protects people’s interests and solves public problems effectively and justly. Unfortunately, the current discourse of transparency—focused as it is on accountability and issues such as corruption—produces policies and platforms that are particularly sensitive to government’s mistakes but often are blind to its accomplishments. Transparency in this sense is like a school report card that only reports when a student is sent to detention, plays hooky from class, or fails courses, but does not register when she earns As in her course. The systems of open government that we’re building—structures that facilitate citizens’ social and political judgments—are much more disposed to seeing the glass of government as half or even one-quarter empty, rather than mostly full.
Thus the progressive impulse for transparency—shared famously by Justice Brandeis as well as most of the authors of this volume—may well produce conservative or even reactionary effects of delegitimizing government activity quite broadly as public disclosure feeds more and more stories of government waste, corruption, and failure. To illustrate, consider current efforts to disclose federal stimulus spending activity. Much of that disclosure aims to make public the flow of funds through contracts, enabling journalists and citizen-auditors to “follow the money.” This is a worthy contribution to forming public judgments about the stimulus package. But its main thrust provides less information on project progress, its capacity to provide employment to parts of the labor force particularly hard hit by the recession, or the public value created by the spending (e.g., how much local users of an improved transportation line benefit from decreased commuting time or more predictable service). Instead, the approach tends to focus on costs and not the commensurate public benefits arising from the spending. Imagine if Amazon or Internet Movie Database (IMDb) reviews only allowed users to point out problems with books and movies but not to highlight what they thought was artful and creative about them. People who looked at Amazon and IMDb reviews would think that the overall quality of books and movies was very poor indeed. That’s what stimulus transparency—and much government disclosure generally—does.
The solution to this problem is not to reduce government transparency, but rather to create a fuller accounting of it. Instead of focusing solely on disclosure systems that produce accountability, we should press for disclosure systems that allow citizens to identify and express their evaluation of government activities as they would private products and services. One promising set of examples of this is public accounting systems developed by a number of local governments that provide a platform for citizens, civic groups, and other organizations to provide ongoing feedback on the service provision of specific government agencies or key providers such as the police.[126]
But these fledgling examples need to be ramped up, particularly given the escalating scale and scope of government activity in response to the economic crisis. Disclosures about federal economic stimulus activities, for example, need to be organized around projects rather than contracts—that is, on the users who ultimately benefit from expenditures. They might report many dimensions of performance—such as the number of jobs created and the quality of those jobs. And they might enable residents in local communities to rate those projects—as they rate books, movies, and hotels on commercial sites—on criteria such as how they are serving specific public needs and the quality of services provided.[127] Americans might be justified in feeling pretty good about the stimulus in areas with many five-star projects and suspicious where there were lots of projects with just one or two stars. In essence, we need transparency that provides a full accounting of the benefits as well as the costs of government activities. The information technologies are readily available;[128] what we need is the political drive to foster a more complete form of open government.
[125] The American National Election Studies, The ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior (University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies). In a similar vein, Tocqueville famously noted, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1838, reprinted by Harper Perennial, 1988].)
[126] See, for example, “What Exactly Is City Stat?”, Bob Behn, The Operator’s Manual for the New Administration, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008.
[127] One interesting example of the elements of such a system was created by the nonprofit news organization ProPublica on its website. The “Stimulus Progress Bar” and associated materials provide ongoing tracking of the progress of stimulus spending across the country (see http://www.propublica.org/ion/stimulus).
[128] Many of the burgeoning information technologies developed by the private sector could be readily adapted to this task. This has been recognized by a growing number of organizations, including an offshoot of Google, Google Public Sector, which focuses on developing new applications for public sector organizations.