3 ms·
I recently discovered that US Congressional votes used to be "anonymous" in the sense that the vote COUNTS would be public but who voted for what was kept secre
by alexpotato 3y ago
I recently discovered that US Congressional votes used to be "anonymous" in the sense that the vote COUNTS would be public but who voted for what was kept secret.
The voting was then changed so that actual votes where made public in favor of more transparency. While it did indeed make the vote more open and visible to the public, it had the effect of showing lobbyists exactly which members of Congress were voting for and against the lobbyists' interests. This in turn led to funding going to the pro-lobby Congress members and the vicious cycle accelerates.
This video lecture goes into much more detail about the process and the impact that this had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg
As a post script, I forget if it's in the video or somewhere else but experiments in real political bodies (I believe it was the Italian parliament) with both a public and secret vote for the same legal bill led to two completely different outcomes.
- m3at 3y agoI learned about this effect too recently in an ACX post, let me add a link for the curious: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-secret-government https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-secret-gov...
- alexpotato 3y agoThis article was both exactly in line with the point I was making and excellent. Thanks for sharing!