Transparency vs. Informality in Legislative Committees: Comparing the US House of Representatives, the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the European Parliament

Abstract

Although committees are deemed to be – in this century, as in the previous one – the ‘legislative backbone’ of legislatures, scholars have not devoted enough attention to how parliamentary committees cope with the challenge of the ‘forced increased transparency’ of their legislative activity, depending on the opportunity to use old and new media as channels of institutional communication with citizens. On the one hand, increased transparency could be an added value of their work. On the other hand, there is the risk that the wider disclosure of legislative committees’ activity could undermine their ability to act as ‘consensus-building’ arenas, and thus affect their legislative capacity. The article argues that increasing levels of transparency can impair committees’ lawmaking performance, so also undermining the lawmaking ability of their legislatures. In three very different legislatures (the US House of Representatives, the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the European Parliament), both in institutional architecture and committees’ legislative powers, the growing transparency of their legislative activity has caused a shifting of the legislative decision-making away from committees or, even, outside the legislature.