Elected legislators have simple incentives. Loudly claim responsibility for anything good that happens to their constituents. Deny responsibility for anything bad. If at all possible, deny the existence of anything really bad.
Avoiding blame is the primary reason law codes are so complex and hard to read. The average spending increase is passed to great fanfare and acclaim. The average tax increase is mentioned briefly in an amendment to an amendment to a sub-section of a codicil to a rider on resolution to honor the US Winter Olympics team for their fine performance in... wherever.
Ultimately, this works because of attention shortage. There are people (with various political agendas) who read the text of every bill, cross-reference things, and try to connect the dots. They probably issue press releases every day. They only get the public's attention a few times a year, usually when they discover flagrant abuse of an elected office, a sex scandal, or similar.
In other words, we could already have this, but we don't. Knowing something is very important -- that you should want it -- is completely different from actually wanting it.
> Elected legislators have simple incentives. Loudly claim responsibility for anything good that happens to their constituents. Deny responsibility for anything bad. If at all possible, deny the existence of anything really bad.
Yes!
> Avoiding blame is the primary reason law codes are so complex and hard to read.
There's another important trick - delegate the actual regulation writing to an agency. That way, the legislator's fingerprints are not anywhere near the actual rules. And, said legislators can also take credit for intervening with the regulators.
What I imagine this would do is create yet more information that we have to sift through. I'm not convinced that the solution to any problem in our age is more data. I'm very interested in finding information that is relevant to me and ubiquitous recording seems to be increasing the level of noise.
I appreciate that news outlets filter through the noise, but sometimes very interesting information gets reported in a dull manner, causing few people to pick it up or get excited about it and share it, or very banal information (say a sex scandal) gets sensationalist reporting, causing it to drown out other important points.
The possibility of an always-on-the-record government lies not in chasing around members of congress with flip cameras but capturing their inputs, outputs and making that data accessible to ordinary citizens.
You're not going to create any good by looking over someone's shoulder and watching them constantly. You don't do it at work, neither does your boss and neither should your congressman. But what should be happening is we should be measuring their data, their outputs and coming up with systemic, non-politically-charged ways to measure performance and tracking them.
Synopsis: I'm far more interested in supplying the Nate Silver's of the world with more concrete data about Congress than I am having 24 hour video surveillance on Harry Reid.
I'm not sure what the point of this would be. In the United States, the accountability that is important during elections has very little relation to the results of the legislation that a congressmen voted on. In other countries, like the UK for example, the only accountability that most MPs need is that they voted consistently with the party line.
It's sort of a flaw in democracy that voters will be fully informed about their elected leaders and within one election cycle will be able to judge how effective a leader or congressman turned out to be. An always on-the-record congressman wouldn't make any of that better.
Elected officials that were 'always on the record' would be constantly 'playing to the camera' to try and 'look good' or make the other guy 'look bad.'
Avoiding blame is the primary reason law codes are so complex and hard to read. The average spending increase is passed to great fanfare and acclaim. The average tax increase is mentioned briefly in an amendment to an amendment to a sub-section of a codicil to a rider on resolution to honor the US Winter Olympics team for their fine performance in... wherever.
Ultimately, this works because of attention shortage. There are people (with various political agendas) who read the text of every bill, cross-reference things, and try to connect the dots. They probably issue press releases every day. They only get the public's attention a few times a year, usually when they discover flagrant abuse of an elected office, a sex scandal, or similar.
In other words, we could already have this, but we don't. Knowing something is very important -- that you should want it -- is completely different from actually wanting it.