Government Transparency Grades!

[Jim Harper]

(Oh yes. This is cross-posted. Apologies.)

 

It's time to roll out transparency grades!

This isn't anything innovative, but part of my strategy for improving government transparency is to give public recognition to the political leaders who get ahead on transparency and public disappropbation to those who fall behind.

So we have a report coming out Monday that assesses how well government data is being published. (Oversight data, that is: reflecting deliberations, management, and results.)

I went ahead and previewed it on the Cato blog last night. The more attention you can help bring to it, the better. Please advertise far and wide, using whatever resource you have. (Recommended: *the Internet*. Y'know. Email, Twitter, Facebook, and stuff. You should check them out if you haven't already.)

The upshot? I find that President Obama lags House Republicans in terms of data transparency.

Neither are producing stellar data, but Congress's edge is made more acute by the strong transparency promises the president made as a campaigner in 2008, which are largely unrealized. My pet peeve is the lack of a machine-readable government organization chart, not even at the agency and bureau level. Seriously? Seriously.

The House is showing modest success and promising signs with some well structured data at docs.house.gov and good potential at beta.congress.gov.

I hustled to get these grades out before the election, and maybe there are one or two marginal voters who this study might sway. (yeahhh, right) But the real reason for doing that is because I'm going to do it again---and better!---in two years, and again in four. We will be measuring progress and calling it out for the public to consider.

We've put together a pretty good methodology for assessing data publication, I think, and the division of responsibility for data among political leaders is pretty clear. So this instrument will be a way for the public to assess progress on something they want.

A debt of thanks I owe to folks at GovTrack.us, the National Priorities Project, OMB Watch, and the Sunlight Foundation, who helped me review the government's data publication practices. (Mind you, their help does not imply agreement with MY conclusions.)

Thank you in advance for YOUR help with disseminating this information far and wide!

Cheers!

Jim

 

Jim Harper
Director of Information Policy Studies
The Cato Institute

[J.H. Snider]

Since Congress and the Executive Branch have very different democratic functions, it will be interesting to see how those functions are normalized so that they can be graded on a comparable scale.  It would seem more useful, from my perspective, to compare the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate or different legislatures.

 

Despite the above, my general impression is that the Executive Branch runs circles around Congress in self-transparency.  This can most easily be understood in terms of incentives: Congress tends to be far more amenable to seeking transparency from the executive branch than itself.   Hearing the non-intuitive opposing argument should be thought provoking.

 

--Jim Snider

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[Daniel Schuman]

Jim S.,

My impression, and it's only an impression, is that transparency (in recent years) is correlated to frequency of elections combined (in some mysterious way) with frequency of change in party control. The concept of transparency is incredibly broad, so for the purposes of my evaluation, I mean the ability of the public to see what's going on that is aided by voluntary measures of the institution itself (and not imposed upon it by someone else.) 

Thus, because of the construction of the institutions, the House by its nature is (generally speaking) more transparent than the White House, which is more transparent than the Senate, which is more transparent than the Courts. (I don't know where the agencies fit in this schema, but it would depend much on how they are constituted -- independent or executive, single or multiple member, fixed term or good behavior, etc.)

Of course, there's room for tremendous variation. President Obama and Speaker Boehner both had very specific transparency commitments, which is historically unusual. (Although Boehner's predecessor, Speaker Pelosi, also had made and followed through on significant commitments). Both Boehner and Obama could, in some way, be viewed as responding to their predecessors. The Senate, by contrast, has been moribund on transparency, and the Courts are a laggard.  

So if we're comparing the White House to the House of Representatives, the question to my mind isn't who is more transparent, but rather who is more transparent as compared to their institutional baseline -- looking at the goals they set for themselves.

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I also want to congratulate Jim Harper on a very useful report. I hope that everyone reads it. What's most interesting to me is not the bottom line, but how the results were reached.

Daniel

Daniel Schuman
Director | Advisory Committee on Transparency
Policy Counsel | The Sunlight Foundation
o: 202-742-1520 x 273 | c: 202-713-5795 | @danielschuman

[Jim Harper]

Thanks for your thoughts, Daniel and Jim. Interesting ideas about the institutional incentives at play.

 

The methodology is described in some detail in the report. But in brief, we modeled the data that reflects key governmental processes (legislative process and budgeting/appropriating/spending), then assessed and graded (with weightings) how well these data are published in terms of authoritative sourcing (10%), availability (20%), machine-discoverability (30%), and machine-readability (40%).

 

(Processes that yet need modeling and grading include regulation and revenue. Watch for that in 2013. The former is probably doable; the latter is probably super-difficult!)

 

I think this is a pretty good methodology, but I'm open to suggestions for improvement, and I've already thought of ways to administer the grading better next time. The important thing, I think, is that it's a methodology that can be applied with some consistency.

 

My reason for putting it together was because I don't think we in the transparency community have made clear enough exactly what we want in the past --- we want data. And it will be interesting to see whether our impressions about incentives and the actual transparency of different governmental bodies line up with what we find through this data-centric form of examination.

 

Not wanting to pollute this group with administrivia about my work, I maintain a low-bandwidth email list on that. Anyone interested, please send me a note and I'll add you.

 

Finally, I must confess to misspelling "disapprobation" below. How embarrassing! What I typed is "disappropbation," which is probably some Freudian combination of the word I meant and "appropriation." Obviously, I do too much public policy. And not enough spell-checking.

 

Jim

[J.H. Snider]

I’d like to highlight one area where I consider transparency to run in reverse order from Daniel’s hierarchy. 

 

An important democratic and transparency norm is that public policymakers publicly explain the reasons for their decisions.  Here the judicial branch wins hands down.   We might not get too much public exposure to the process of their decision making, but we get the best explanations as to why they made the decisions that they did.

 

Thanks in large part to the Administrative Procedures Act, the executive branch comes in second in this regard.  The APA provides not only unparalleled access to the policy making process; it forces agencies to articulate reasons for their rulemakings and tie those reasons to the information gathered in the decision making process.

 

In contrast, the institutional framework for Congress means getting any coherent explanation for Congressional actions on most legislation, let alone ones that are remotely honest, appears all but impossible.

 

I would suggest that the quality of institutional archives is in the same order: 1) judicial branch, 2) executive branch, and 3) Congress. 

 

Of course, in other normative dimensions, the ones that are the apparent focus of the study under discussion, the hierarchy can be reversed.  I’d grant that if explicit commitments to transparency are the benchmark, the White House comes up at the bottom of the heap.  On the hand, if it’s implicit commitments to transparency are the benchmark (that is, appearing to be what you are not), the answer is much muddier.  Congress excels in signaling that it is much more transparent than it is in practice.  Just consider the difference in culture between the front room and back room of a Congressional office.  The former exudes friendliness and openness.  The latter places a premium on trust and secrecy.

 

From the little I have heard about the study, it’s not clear to me how an executive vs. legislative action is defined.  Take the Data Act.  It’s created by Congress but applies to the executive branch.  Who should get credit for that transparency breakthrough?  Congress passed it, but it is overwhelmingly geared toward making the executive, not legislative branch, more accountable.  The bottom line for me is that this becomes yet another case where the executive branch, for all its secrecy and misleading information, wins the transparency crown in comparison to Congress.

 

--Jim

[Daniel Schuman]

Jim S.,

I think this can become complicated quickly, especially if the terms of the question shift from what  each branch can do on its own to the consequences of the branches working to bind the actions of another (whether through presidential engagement in the legislative process, legislative oversight of executive branch behavior, court decisions that place obligations on the other branches, etc.) Generally speaking, each branch is more likely to impose conduct requirements on the other branches, which is why Jim Harper's assessment is particular interesting when it focuses on what each branch does on its own volition from a data transparency and access standpoint.

From my perspective, I would not say that the Courts have much to brag about with respect to the type of transparency I care a lot about -- real public access to the records of proceedings. The US Supreme Court, for example, does not have its own opinions online prior to 2005 or 6, it does not have the amici filings online (except for a few), you cannot watch its proceedings online (and only recently has it begun making audio available, except in the circumstances detailed by the Oyez project), you cannot see the discussions among the justices that engages in horse trading on reasons for supporting an issue, and there's a huge cloak of secrecy around what it does. The lower courts usually publish their materials in print propriety formats owned by West or Lexis, and only with the concerted work of some outside groups is there any free public online access to their opinions, and the vast majority don't make video of their proceedings online. And the processes by which the judges set their own rules of procedure usually require significant connections and often a law degree before they will even speak with you. They may meet a benchmark of theoretical transparency, but there's a lot more to it than the  mere possibility of access.

The APA requirements are a horse of a different color, and fall into the category of joint action between the three branches. The courts have interpreted the law in interesting ways; the legislature and executive branch have collaborated and fought over its language, and so on. It also doesn't fit into the category we're using of things a branch does on its own. A better example would be the voluntary disclosure of lobbying efforts aimed at OIRA, as required by EO, and only casually implemented.

I cannot speak to the quality of the institutional archives -- at least I don't quite understand how you are making that assessment and what you are included as the archives. I'd be interesting in learning more.

For my money, I'm more interested in assessing the various branches against a gold standard of what they should be doing, and looking across the branches for inspiration as to the kinds of behavior that are possible. E.g., uses transparency in executive branch adjudicatory proceedings in article III proceedings, looking at the legislature as agencies engage in rulemakings, etc, etc.

Daniel

Daniel Schuman
Director | Advisory Committee on Transparency
Policy Counsel | The Sunlight Foundation
o: 202-742-1520 x 273 | c: 202-713-5795 | @danielschuman

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