From substantive transparency reforms to performative transparency

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• EGPP: European Governance and Politics Programme

Join Maria Zuffova as she explores what dynamics shape the relationship between transparency and populism in parliamentary contexts

Transparency has long been considered an important normative ideal, essential for the functioning of democracy and the integrity of political competition. While a significant body of research has focused on substantive transparency reforms, such as access to information legislation, fewer studies have investigated how populist political leaders and anti-establishment parties exploit the transparency agenda, especially outside the US context.

This chapter focuses on MPs’ debates on transparency in the Slovak parliament between 1994 and 2023. The findings of the quantitative analysis show that transparency became a salient topic only recently, in 2009, with its continued rise attributable to the Gorilla corruption scandal and the establishment of the populist OLaNO party. The qualitative discourse analysis sheds light on which actors in parliament use transparency, for what purposes, and lays the groundwork for a framework categorising political actors into: (1) transparency institutionalisers, who discuss substantive transparency reforms, and (2) transparency instrumentalists, who misappropriate transparency for political confrontation.