5 - Representation

Summary

Finding little evidence in Chapter 4 to support the arguments of opponents to open meetings laws, Chapter 5 considers the argument of proponents. Open meetings advocates, and indeed, state laws themselves imply that representation improves in the wake of the adoption of open meetings. We conduct an empirical test of the claim that open meetings are essential for the public to hold legislators to account, and thus, for representation to actually occur in the policymaking process. We assess the effects of transparency on numerous outcomes related to representation, including its impact on policy responsiveness and policy innovation. We also consider whether open legislatures are more particularistic – emphasizing the allocation of funding and resources to individual districts more than efforts to make broad statewide policy. Similar to Chapter 4, we show that open meetings consistently exert precisely estimated, but substantively small, effects on representation. Thus, despite the normative promise of transparency reforms, we come to the pessimistic conclusion that they do not achieve their primary goal.