Lawrence Lessig writes in The New Republic on the inadequacy of transparency as a convention of good government, alluding particularly to its troublesome role in political campaign finance.
"The naked transparency movement marries the power of network technology to the radical decline in the cost of collecting, storing, and distributing data. Its aim is to liberate that data, especially government data, so as to enable the public to process it and understand it better, or at least differently....
"Without a doubt, the vast majority of these transparency projects make sense. In particular, management transparency, which is designed to make the performance... of government agencies more measurable, will radically improve how government works.
"But that is not the whole transparency story. There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has--in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption....
"The problem...is that not all data satisfies the simple requirement that they be information that consumers can use, presented in a way they can use it. "More information," as [Harvard Professor Archon] Fung and his colleagues put it, "does not always produce markets that are more efficient." Instead, "responses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response....
"What does the fact of a contribution to a member of Congress mean? Does a contribution cause a member to take a position? Does a member’s position cause the contribution? Does the prospect of a contribution make a member more sensitive to a position? Does it secure access? Does it assure a better hearing? Do members compete for positions based upon the contributions they might expect? Do they covet committee assignments based upon the contributions that the committee will inspire? Does Congress regulate with an eye to whether its regulation might induce more contributions?
"There is little doubt that the answer to each of these questions is, in some sense and at some time--remember those qualifiers!--yes. In a series titled Speaking Freely, published by the Center for Responsive Politics, you can find testimony from many former members from both parties to support each of those assertions. Everyone inside the system knows that claims about influence are, to some degree, true. It is the nature of the system, as we all know.
"But there is also little doubt that it is impossible to know whether any particular contribution or contributions brought about a particular vote, or was inspired by a particular vote. Put differently, if there are benign as well as malign contributions, it is impossible to know for any particular contribution which of the two it is. Even if we had all the data in the world and a month of Google coders, we could not begin to sort corrupting contributions from innocent contributions."
We all know the aphorism, An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought. Lessig provoked me to find out who said it. It was an honest politician, um, by his own definition of the term.
Therein lies the problem, and the solution, with respect to our system of political campaign finance. Lessig demonstrates how difficult it is for anyone to determine this particularly political variety of honesty without being able to read the mind of the politician in question. If the politician is denied the transparent knowledge of his or her sources of political campaign finance, we have put him or her on the same footing as the rest of us.
-- Bill Corbett
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