A Visible Union? Reviewing the Literature on EU Decision-Making Transparency

An important communication instrument of the European Union is its transparency policy. Its underpinning rationale is that, through the publication of decision-making documents, citizens can know how their (elected) representatives act on their behalf. EU transparency policy thus serves to create visibility of the decisional process. To fulfil this objective, the European legislator in 2001 adopted an access to documents law, Regulation 1049/2001, which facilitates ‘the widest possible openness’. After nearly twenty years, the question seems warranted how the access law, the transparency policy that it supports, and the visibility rationale that underpins it, may be evaluated. This paper seeks to do so at a meta-level, through an analysis of the literature on EU transparency. Turning the evaluative question into an empirical question, it goes in search of patterns of interpretation in the academic literature on EU transparency policy. The analysis is based on a body of over 100 academic publications, which are drawn from the author’s personal library assembled over the course of a decade, as well as from keyword searches on online search engines, and systematic searches of the top EU-related journals in the disciplines of law and the social sciences (political science, public administration, and sociology). Patterns are sought in the conceptual, theoretical, and normative presuppositions underpinning the literature (compare Meijer et al., 2012). A tentative analysis suggests that the literature can by-and-large be divided into two ‘schools’. First, an ‘idealist school’ of scholars regards transparency as a value contributing to the construction of a constitutional system for the legitimate exercise of power in the EU. Adherence to this school can take one of two directions: either transparency policy is perceived to largely conform to the developed constitutional ideal, or it falls significantly short, requiring expansion and improvement. Second, a ‘sceptical school’ of academics points out the flaws in the empirical assumptions underpinning transparency policy. Publications in this school often respond directly to (implicit) assertions of ‘idealists’. Sceptics, too, can take their argument in two possible directions: they argue either that transparency policy assumptions do not stand up to empirical scrutiny, or that they are (largely) irrelevant to the problem that they are intended to solve. The paper also discerns a third perspective on government transparency, which is relatively well-represented in the international transparency literature but has received decidedly less attention in the EU context. According to the ‘ironic school’, policies to create government transparency are notoriously elusive, due an inherent ambiguity and reflexivity in the project of ‘creating visibility’. The paper contrasts the ironic perspective with the idealist and sceptic perspective. It finds that the former mobilises concepts and theoretical tools conducive to a more relativising normative perspective that potentially adds useful insights to the development of EU transparency policy. Consequently, the paper makes a plea for introducing an ‘ironic perspective’ in the toolkit of EU transparency studies. Reference Meijer, A.J., D. Curtin and M. Hillebrandt (2012). Open Government: Connecting Vision and Voice. International Review of Administrative Sciences 78(1), 10-29