Is Transparency to No Avail? Committee Decision-Making, Pre-Meetings, and Credible Deals

Otto H. Swank and Bauke Visser ()

No ECO2008/18, Economics Working Papers from European University Institute

Abstract: Transparent decision-making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens may suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else the secrecy? We provide a model of committee decision-making that explains the public.s demand for transparency, and committee members. aversion to it. In line with case study evidence, we show how pressures to become transparent induce committee members to organize pre-meetings away from the public eye. Outcomes of pre-meetings, deals, are less determined, more anarchic, than those of formal meetings, but within bounds. We characterize deals that are self-enforcing in the formal meeting.

Keywords: Committee decision-making; reputational concerns; transparency; pre-meetings; deliberation; self-enforcing deals; coalitions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-lab and nep-pol
Date: Written 2008
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://cadmus.eui.eu/dspace/bitstream/1814/8488/1/ECO_2008_18.pdf main text

Related works:
Working Paper: Is Transparency to no avail? Committee Decision-making, Pre-meetings, and Credible Deals (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from European University Institute
Address: Badia Fiesolana, Via dei Roccettini, 9, 50016 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI) Italy
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Marcia Gastaldo ().