An influential literature has demonstrated that legislative transparency can improve the performance of parliamentarians in democracies. In a democracy, voters can sanction delegates in response to increased information about a delegate’s performance. Some have argued that, in authoritarian regimes, although delegates may not be responsive to voters, they may be responsive to other stakeholders, such as NGOs and local media. If this is the case, transparency may have similar benefits in authoritarian regimes as it does in democracies. Donor projects have begun to export transparency interventions to authoritarian regimes on this basis.
The logic that transparency initiatives will work similarly in an authoritarian setting, however, assumes that legislators in authoritarian systems serve the same role as those in electoral democracies. Emerging work on authoritarian institutions contradicts this assumption. Instead, authoritarian parliaments primarily serve the role of co-optation and limited power sharing, where complaints can be raised in a manner that does not threaten regime stability. Increased transparency may lead legislators to behave in a more conformist manner for fear that public knowledge of disagreement among policy-makers could create instability.
This paper tests this theory with a randomized experiment on delegate behaviour in Vietnam, a single-party authoritarian regime. A randomly selected treatment group of 144 delegates had transcripts and scorecards posted on the web site of the country’s most popular online newspaper, VietnamNet. This did not lead to improved delegate performance or activity. Those delegates in provinces with higher internet penetration were more likely to curtail their participation, and were more likely to be removed from office in the next election. That is, the higher the exposure to transparency, the more likely a delegate was to behave in a conformist manner. The findings of this experiment suggest caution about the export of transparency from electoral democracies to authoritarian systems, where similarly named institutions play vastly different roles in the polity.
