The emergence of targeted transparency as mainstream policy represents an unlikely political innovation. In recent years, national, state, local, and international policymakers have overcomepolitical obstacles to require both private-sector organizations and public agencies to collect and share new facts about the risks they create and the quality of their performance. Legislators have mandated new transparency despite enduring values and political interests that usually favor secrecy. They have also overcome the resistance to innovation that generally characterizes democratic systems of government. Their actions are all the more surprising because they have invented new transparency systems without any central direction and usually without knowledge that their actions are contributing to a broader policy change.

In this chapter we explore why such an unexpected development in governance has occurred at this moment in history by examining the growth of targeted transparency policies in the United States in recent decades.We begin by documenting the frequency with which targeted transparency has been legislated in recent years across many major policy areas.

We then review the development of government-mandated transparency in theUnited States. We find that three factors have helped to propel this new generation of transparency into mainstream policy. First, the maturing of an early generation of right-to-know transparency measures helped to prepare the way for targeted transparency policies. Second, crises that called for urgent responses to suddenly revealed risks or performance problems helped to overcomepolitical forces that favored secrecy and that limited innovation. Finally, a generation of research by economists and cognitive psychologists concerning information failures and communication complexities helped to provide a rationale for government action. This chapter's study of the roots of targeted transparency provides a backdrop for our detailed evaluation of effectiveness in subsequent chapters.

AN UNPLANNED INVENTION

In the last twenty years, targeted transparency policies have played a prominent role as a chosen policy response to a surprising number of national crises. In fact, ten of the fifteen U.S. targeted transparency policies analyzed in this book were created since 1986 (see Table 1.1), with a range of goals including improving the nutritional content of foods, reducing discrimination against minority groups in bank lending, minimizing sudden disruptions for workers and communities from plant closures, furthering patient safety, improving restaurant hygiene to reduce food poisoning, and cutting toxic pollution.