The GOVERNANCE blog

Transparency’s rise as an administrative norm over the past few decades has seemed unstoppable.  But what will happen in the era of Trump?  Mark Fenster explores this question in a new commentary for Governance.  He distinguishes between two conceptions of transparency — technocratic and populist.  Trump seems likely to resist the first conception while embracing the second.  Transparency advocates, who have grown accustomed to thinking about openness in technocratic terms, will have to develop new ways of talking about the subject.  They should “deploy the moral and populist understanding of transparency” that is preferred by Trump himself, to defend the laws and regulations that have been put in place to assure openness. Free access to the commentary.