In a democracy, transparency incentivizes bullshit*

*in the technical, philosophical sense

Modern democracies are solutions to the problem of concentrated political power. When one is subject to the rule of a king or emperor, there are ripe incentives for the abuse of power. The democratic solution is to spread such political power across the population of voting-age citizens, and allow them to exercise their power in elections. Here one may think that democracies, unlike dictatorships and oligarchies, would be more open and honest due to mechanisms like oversight and transparency—if citizens and voters can observe politicians, after all, then they will know what they are doing in the crafting and passing of laws. Though transparency has political benefits, there are also major political costs to transparency too: within a democracy, transparency incentivizes bullshit.

Before explaining the connection between democratic transparency and bullshit, it would be helpful to specific what is meant here by the term ‘bullshit’. It is a technical philosophical term coined by Harry Frankfurt. In explaining the term, he writes:

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose¹.

The term refers to using truth and lies, with little regard for the difference, purely in the service of convincing and manipulating others. There is something about bullshit — as defined by Frankfurt — that is implicitly disrespectful to those who are subject to its manipulation. To give an example to illustrate the difference between the liar and the bullshitter: during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton was a liar; whereas in many cases, Donald Trump is a bullshitter—many of his supporters admit as much.

What’s the connection between democratic transparency and bullshit? Begin with a quote from the philosopher Onora O’Neill:

Transparency can encourage people to be less honest so increasing deception and reducing reasons for trust: those who know that everything they say or write is to be made public may massage the truth. Public reports may underplay sensitive information; head teachers and employers may write blandly uninformative reports and references; evasive and uninformative statements may substitute for truth-telling. Demands for universal transparency are likely to encourage the evasions, hypocrisies and half-truths that we usually refer to as ‘political correctness’, but which might more forthrightly be called either ‘self-censorship’ or ‘deception².’

This passage may strikers readers as outlandish or implausible. However, when one considers the reputations are highly valuable, not only to ordinary people, but especially to politicians, then it would make sense for transparency to incentivize bullshit. People want to look good to others, but they don’t necessarily want to be good. Perhaps one of the most powerful motives driving human actions, especially when they are observed by others, is to build and maintain a good reputation with others. Humans depend on others to survive. Finding suitable cooperation partners—to marry, to have kids with, to start a company with, etc.—requires having a good reputation with said cooperators. Likewise, having a shot a election and reelection requires that politicians have a good reputation with voters. Transparency thus acts like a form of surveillance where people act differently than they would otherwise to avoid, among other costs, hits to their reputation.

Here is example of democratic transparency incentivizing bullshit from Brian Kogelmann:

[It] is certainly true that citizens generally dislike it when those representing them change their positions. This incentivizes politicians to remain steadfast, which makes compromise difficult. Secrecy reduces this barrier to compromise, as it is now impossible to determine whether a politician has changed her views over the course of a debate. With secrecy, the public only knows the outcome of the debate; in the case of the convention, the public only knew what constitution was ultimately decided on. Shrouded in opacity, politicians need not worry about altering their positions as the debate proceeds. This facilitates compromise³.

Since compromise is often vital for the passage and implementation of legislation and policy, the distorting effect of democratic transparency. Where does bullshit come into the picture? Politicians, signaling their principled stance—due to pressures from transparency—often fail to pass important policies and regulations. And so, they need a rationalization to offer voters to justify political stalemates—these rationalizations may be true or false, but they must sound plausible. This is because ‘people can only bring themselves to believe things for which they can find rationalizations⁴,’ and that also applies to bullshit, perhaps especially in the political domain.

Because democracies often favor transparency—to, among other things, inform the voters—there are many more opportunities, than would exist otherwise, for politicians to engage in bullshit. Indeed, the electoral process and openness of democracies incentivizes bullshit—otherwise one might not look good enough to the voters, and thus never achieve political power in a democracy. One shouldn’t be surprised by bullshit in a democracy. It should be expected.

1. Harry Frankfurt (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, pg. 14 (original emphasis)

2. Onora O’Neill (2002). A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002. Cambridge University Press, pg. 73 (my emphasis).

3. Brian Kogelmann (2021). Secret Government: The Pathologies of Publicity. Cambridge University Press, pg. 66 (my emphasis).

4. Daniel Williams (2023). The Marketplace of Rationalizations. Economics and Philosophy 39 (1), p. 1.