How publicity creates opacity: What happens when EU ministers vote publicly

In this chapter, I attempt to assess the effects of publicity on an institution that used to decide behind closed doors – the EU Council of Ministers. This intergovernmental organization passed EU laws behind closed doors until a ruling issued in December 1993 imposed the publication of votes. Empirical investigation reveals that, in some cases, rather than providing citizens with better information on their representatives’ voting positions, increased publicity has created an additional incentive for representatives to be seen as in favor of laws passed by the Council. This finding is partly in line with previous research since a similar mechanism has been observed in other institutional settings such as the U.S. Federal Reserve (Meade and Stasavage 2006) and the U.S. Supreme Court (Epstein, Segal, and Spaeth 2001). However, in these two cases, decision makers used to voice their disagreement more frequently when they knew their votes would not be published. On the contrary, in the diplomatic context of the EU Council of Ministers, because of a strong norm of consensus, the actors were reluctant to voice their disagreement even when votes were not published. I argue that publicity can reinforce the actors’ reluctance to openly disagree. A major implication of this finding is that publicity does not guarantee the disclosure of decision makers’ positions. It is frequent to assume that behind closed doors, actors hold frank debates and that, to make their positions transparent, it would be enough to unveil their meetings. However, institutional design might fail to increase accountability if it overlooks the fact that even behind closed doors, the actors might attempt to conceal their position, in particular when they negotiate. The case study presented in this chapter sheds further light on the reasons why publicity does not necessarily increase accountability (Hood 2010; Tan 2012).