Democracy, Governance, and Law
Abstract:
Purpose – This chapter shows how open meeting laws (also called “sunshine laws”) place administrative burdens on the public and inadvertently thwart political participation.
Methodology/approach – This argument is supported by 36 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 68 interviews with engaged citizens in Wisconsin.
Findings – While the expressed purpose of open meeting laws is to make government more transparent and accountable to the public, this analysis shows how these laws produce administrative burdens that can prevent full public participation in the policymaking process, making government less responsive to citizen input.
Originality/value – This chapter builds on the existing literature in two ways. First, much of the research on open government initiatives examines how these efforts burden the state. This chapter complements this view by showing how these same efforts place burdens on the public. Second, much of the policy feedback and administrative burdens literature examines laws that govern access to social programs. This chapter extends these insights to open government laws, which govern the policymaking process itself.