Democratic institutions are generally expected to be transparent. By transparency, broadly understood, we refer to the way that such institutions operate under public scrutiny. This will typically entail the possibility for (groups of) citizens to access documents produced by representatives or civil servants, or the possibility of witnessing deliberative processes in action, e.g. in parliamentary assemblies. Yet, the precise effects of transparency and the exact function it plays in such a democratic setting are still not entirely clear, despite the fact that the public generally tends to consider transparency as having globally positive effects on democracies.
In the academic literature most relevant to political scientists, there are at least four sets of focus points. First, there is an extensive legal literature on "Freedom of Information" or "sunshine" laws, devoted to the mechanics of such complex regimes, i.e. their scope in terms of right-holders, the interpretation of the various grounds justifying temporary or permanent denial of access (trade secrets, privacy,β¦), the ways in which one can accommodate different conflicting rights in this context (e.g. Eagles, Taggart and Liddell 1992 for a legal source and for a recent public administration approach, Roberts 2006). Second, the growing literature focusing on corruption has some papers on the connection between transparency and corruption (see e.g. Linstedt and Naurin 2005 focusing on the "free press" dimension). Third, there is some literature dating back to the nineteenth century on whether voting by citizens should remain secret or become transparent. Whereas the debate was lively at that time, involving contributions of major figures such as James Mill (1830) or John Stuart Mill (1861) there is hardly any recent literature on the topic, with the notable exception of Brennan and Pettit (1990) (see Gosseries 2005 on this "secret ballot" debate).