Publicity is the most effective remedy for corruption and abuse.
Brandeis wrote in Harper's Weekly in 1913, in a series collected as Other People's Money (1914), that sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants and electric light the most efficient policeman. He was arguing for disclosure requirements on banks and investment houses, which later took shape in the American securities laws of the 1930s.
In practice
- A council starts publishing every contract online, and the share awarded without competition falls.
- An office fridge with a posted list of whose food is whose suffers fewer thefts.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is deterrence: wrongdoing likely to be seen is costlier. Another is accountability: disclosure lets voters, investors and journalists act on information they could not otherwise get.
- In its favour
- Supported by studies in which releasing audit findings changed outcomes, such as Ferraz and Finan's 2008 study of Brazil's municipal audits, and by the spread of disclosure law.
- Against it
- Transparency can also backfire, driving decisions into informal channels, encouraging performance for the audience, or burying people in disclosures they cannot use. Bernstein's 2012 study described a transparency paradox in which being watched lowered productivity.
- Standing
- Compare the Hawthorne effect and Goodhart's law.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works