How does Transparency Impact on the Relationship between Representation and Accountability?

Abstract

Reconciling democracy and efficiency is a difficult balancing act. Yet, as societies have become more interdependent and complex, reaching agreement is increasingly challenging. Delegating authority to more informal and shielded settings only containing a subset of key actors can therefore be deemed a fruitful mechanism for building trust and flexibility to solve differences and reach compromise among decision-makers. But whereas shielded settings might be good for building trust among decision-makers, such settings remove decision-making processes even further away from and in many ways disconnects citizens from their elected representatives. The panel aims for both theoretical-conceptual and empirical papers addressing the circumstances for if and how democratic representation and accountability can be reconciled with decision-makers’ urge to delegate important parts of decision-making to publicly more or less inaccessible settings and non-democratic representatives.