Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • 3 - Measuring Legislative Transparency

  • from Part I - Transparency and State Legislatures
  • Justin H. Kirkland, University of Virginia, Jeffrey J. Harden, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: The Illusion of Accountability
  • Published online: 11 August 2022
  • Print publication: 25 August 2022, pp 51-81

  • 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.