Is Transparency Desirable?

Democratic legislatures are forums for debate and collective decision over the diverse values their members represent, and their internal workings are generally meant to be subject to monitoring from outside actors. By forcing debate into an open setting, legislatures may limit admissible arguments on behalf of interests or policy positions to those that can be defended in public. Transparency in voting, moreover, opens the possibility that individual representatives can be held accountable for their votes by those they represent.

The argument for transparency in legislative voting rests on twin ideas. One is that political elites and ordinary citizens differ in their claims to anonymity in political action. The other is that information about legislative voting actually gets to voters. According to the conventional logic, anonymity is necessary for voters, through the secret ballot, to free them from intimidation in elections, but in legislative voting it undermines democratic accountability. In effect, legislators ought to be subject to pressure on their votes, but citizens should not (United States Supreme Court 1958).

The distinction between legislative voting as public and elections as private is not universally shared. Jean Jacques Rousseau, for example, did not advocate public voting in legislatures but nevertheless makes a case for public voting in elections. Rousseau regarded individual legislative votes as of less interest than the collective result.