Does transparency generate legitimacy? An experimental study of procedure acceptance of open-and closed-door decision-making

Abstract

Transparency has been a major trend in reforms of political institutions and public administrations in the last decades. This article analyses the main rationale for supplying transparency from the governing elites’ perspective, namely that it generates legitimacy among the constituents. Although working in a goldfish bowl entails costs for governments the prospect of increased support weighs heavily on the other side. But does transparency have the power to increase public legitimacy? We make both a theoretical and an empirical contribution to this question. The theoretical contribution lies in identifying plausible causal mechanisms that may drive a positive – or a negative – link between transparency and legitimacy. We discuss three different theories of decision-making, from which such mechanisms may be derived. We find that the common notion of a fairly straightforward positive correlation between transparency and legitimacy is rather naïve. The effect is highly dependent on the context, which makes transparency reforms rather unpredictable phenomena. Empirically, we study representative decision-making in a school context. We use vignette experiments to test the effect of transparency on legitimacy under different conditions. Our findings indicate that transparency can indeed increase the legitimacy of representative decision-making. People who are informed about decisions which affect their everyday lives are more willing to accept the process by which the decisions were taken if they are given insight into the reasoning behind the decisions. Interestingly, however, this insight need not be derived from “fishbowl transparency”, with full openness of the decision-making process. Decision-makers may significantly improve the legitimacy simply by motivating carefully afterwards the decisions taken behind closed doors (transparency in rationale). Only when transparency displays behaviour close to a deliberative democratic ideal (respectful and rational argumentation) will full openness of the process improve on closed-door decision-making with post-decision motivations.