Representative Government Hoards Information, and the Hoarding Is the Point

Among the ailments of representative government there is one that gets less attention than corruption or incompetence, and I think it is more fundamental than either: the concealment of information. Not the occasional scandal, but the routine, structural fact that the branches of government keep what they know from the public, and from each other.

Concealment Is Not an Accident

Every ministry knows things the public does not. That is inevitable; a ministry is where the information is produced. What is not inevitable is that the default is to keep it.

Budgets are published in a form nobody can read. Contracts are awarded on grounds nobody outside the room can check. Intelligence assessments, feasibility studies, the minutes of the meetings where the real decisions were taken, all exist and are classified, delayed, or released decades later when everyone involved is dead. Freedom-of-information laws exist precisely because the natural tendency ran the other way and had to be legislated against, and every practitioner will tell you how well those laws work: slowly, partially, and with the important parts blacked out.

The concealment runs between branches as well. The executive keeps things from the legislature, which is supposed to oversee it. Agencies keep things from ministers. Every layer knows more than the layer above it about what it actually does, and uses the difference.

This is not a defect that better people would fix. It is a strategy that the structure rewards. Information is power in the plainest sense: the party that knows what the options really are decides which options the others get to see. A representative, an official, an agency that surrenders its informational advantage surrenders its position. None of them will do so voluntarily, and the system contains nobody with both the interest and the power to make them.

What the Public Cannot See, It Cannot Decide

The consequence is that the public is asked to judge a government whose actual conduct it cannot observe.

You are told the outcome and asked whether you approve. You are not shown what the alternatives were, what they would have cost, who argued for which, or who benefited from the one chosen. A vote cast under those conditions is not a judgement; it is a reaction to a presentation. I have argued that the system hides reality from us in the sense that we misattribute its outputs to persons. Concealment is the mechanism underneath: we attribute to persons because the structural facts have been kept out of view.

And the concealment protects itself. A public that cannot see the information cannot see that it is being denied it. It sees a competent-looking spokesman and a document with the interesting pages missing, and it has no way of knowing what the missing pages said.

What Direct Democracy Does to Information

Now consider a system in which the public decides the questions directly.

The first thing that changes is who needs the information. Under representation, the decider is the representative, and the information flows to him and stops. Under direct decision, the deciders are the public, and information that does not reach them has not reached the decision. A system cannot ask millions of people to decide and simultaneously withhold from them what the decision is about. The pressure to release becomes structural rather than legal, because the decision cannot be made without it.

The second thing is that the incentive to hoard weakens. The value of an informational advantage lies in the small number of people you hold it against. An official who knows something the minister does not has leverage over one person. An official who knows something the whole electorate does not, on a question the electorate is about to vote on, has not leverage but a liability: when it comes out, and it will, he was the one who kept it.

The Wisdom of Crowds Needs Something to Chew On

There is a common objection that releasing everything would drown the public in detail it cannot use. Nobody can read a ten-thousand-page budget.

That objection confuses reading with processing. The public does not process information the way a single reader does. It processes it the way a crowd does: many people each look at the part they know about, the mistakes and anomalies get found by whoever is positioned to find them, and the findings propagate. This is how open-source software gets debugged, how a large encyclopaedia gets corrected, how a fraud gets noticed by an accountant in a different city who happened to be reading the filing. The mechanism works only when the material is open. It has never had a chance to work on government, because government has never been open enough for it to start.

So the two halves fit together. Representative government conceals because concealment is where its power lives. Direct democracy releases because the decision cannot be made otherwise, and then the released information gets sifted by the only processor large enough to sift it. The government's own analysts are outnumbered a million to one by an electorate that has been given the file. That is not a loss of expertise. It is the first time the expertise has had a reader.