Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency - Hardcover

Fung, Archon; Graham, Mary; Weil, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521876176 ISBN 13: 9780521876179

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Governments in recent decades have employed public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, as Full Disclosure shows these policies are frequently ineffective or counterproductive. Based on a comparative analysis of eighteen major policies, the authors suggest that transparency policies often produce information that is incomplete, incomprehensible, or irrelevant to the consumers, investors, workers, and community residents who could benefit from them. Sometimes transparency fails because those who are threatened by it form political coalitions to limit or distort information. To be successful, transparency policies must place the needs of ordinary citizens at centre stage and produce information that informs their everyday choices.

About this title

Review:

'This rich, carefully researched, well balanced, and readily accessible study shows us that good governance, with legislators at the local, state or national levels in the lead, is surely difficult but far from unattainable. This hard nosed scholarship demonstrating, as the authors themselves discovered, that pragmatism about both policy expectations and policy results should prevail among political leaders and citizens alike.' Perspectives on Politics

Book Description:

Full Disclosure is the first analysis of national and international transparency policies that aim to reduce serious public risks and improve critical services. Targeted transparency policies include car safety ratings, nutritional labels, school report cards, campaign finance disclosures, and toxic pollution disclosures.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0521876176
• ISBN 13: 9780521876179
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 300