Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-p566r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T11:46:03.927Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Measuring Legislative Transparency

from Part I - Transparency and State Legislatures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2022

Justin H. Kirkland
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Jeffrey J. Harden
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Get access

Summary

Chapter 3 introduces our approach to measuring the transparency of deliberations in state legislatures. We discuss our coding strategies and provide descriptive information about our temporal data on the adoption of open deliberation laws and exemptions to those laws. This summary of the data provides important context, including general patterns in the timing and geography of the transparency movement and its recent decline. Importantly, the chapter includes a discussion on enforcement of these laws, demonstrating empirically that they are not written as token gestures toward accountability. They are intended to provide meaningful, powerful mechanisms to keep legislative deliberation public. Finally, we develop event history models of transparency adoption and exemption across the states to better understand the systematic factors associated with the decisions to open or close legislative meetings. These models generalize the historical patterns we uncover in Chapter 2, demonstrating in particular the pivotal role of a powerful press corps in pushing the transparency initiative forward and sustaining it over time.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Illusion of Accountability
Transparency and Representation in American Legislatures
, pp. 51 - 81
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×