دانلود رایگان مقاله اثر "تابش آفتاب" در بحث سیاست گذاری: مورد کمیته بازار باز فدرال

abstract

How does an increase in transparency affect policy deliberation? Increased government transparency is commonly advocated as beneficial to democracy. Others argue that transparency can undermine democratic deliberation by, for example, causing poorer reasoning. We analyze the effect of increased transparency in the case of a rare natural experiment involving the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). In 1994 the FOMC began the delayed public release of verbatim meeting transcripts and announced it would release all transcripts of earlier, secret, meetings back into the 1970s. To assess the effect of this change in transparency on deliberation, we develop a measure of an essential aspect of deliberation, the use of reasoned arguments. Our contributions are twofold: we demonstrate a method for measuring deliberative reasoning and we assess how a particular form of transparency affected ongoing deliberation. In a regression model with a variety of controls, we find increased transparency had no independent effect on the use of deliberative reasoning in the FOMC. Of particular interest to deliberative scholars, our model also demonstrates a powerful role for leaders in facilitating deliberation. Further, both increasing participant equality and more frequent expressions of disagreement were associated with greater use of deliberative language.

9. Conclusion

By analyzing a sharp break in practices of the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee, we have been able to assess the effect of sunshine on deliberation. To make this assessment, we developed a measurement of a core element of deliberation, use of reasoning language. This method addresses a significant gap in existing empirical research on deliberation. It is straightforward in application and interpretation, easy for others to adapt, and it can be used to examine change across time and context. Our initial validation of the measure relies on comparison across contexts in which we would expect considerable variation in deliberation. Those results were consistent with our expectations and suggest that our approach can be used to evaluate deliberation in a variety of contexts. In developing our dictionary of reasoning terms we tried to avoid terms unique to the monetary policy domain. We believe this makes it more likely that the same, or similar, dictionaries would be useful in measuring deliberative reasoning elsewhere, and modifications that might be appropriate in other contexts are straightforward.