4 - Compromise

Summary

The example of Massachusetts from Chapter 2 illustrates the most prominent critique of open meetings laws among politicians, political observers, and academics: that transparency, and thus increased public oversight, reduces legislative compromise and makes the policymaking process more gridlocked, partisan, and difficult. In Chapter 4 we put the logic of this conventional wisdom to the test. We demonstrate, with a wide range of quantitative analyses, that the effect of transparency on political compromise among legislators is virtually nonexistent. We examine rates of party loyalty, the probability of passing budgets on time, the number of bills introduced and passed, and several other measures. These analyses consistently show that policymaking and compromise are unchanged by states opening or closing their legislative meetings to the public. Importantly, we demonstrate that these null results are not the product of low statistical power. Rather, they are precisely estimated negligible effects.