Overview

Since the mid-1980s, the US Congress and state legislatures have approved scores of new disclosure laws to fight racial discrimination, reduce corruption and improve services. They require corporations and other organizations to produce standardized factual information at regular intervals about health, safety, or environmental threats they create. Instead of simply playing a supporting role in the framing of government rules, information has become an instrument of social policy. In this text Graham argues that these requirements represent a remarkable policy innovation. Enhanced by computer power and the Internet, they are creating a new techno-populism - an optimistic conviction that information itself can improve the lives of ordinary citizens. Graham explains why disclosure has flourished during a time of regulatory retrenchment and why corporations have often supported these raids on proprietary information. However, she sounds a cautionary note. Just as systems of financial disclosure have come under new scrutiny in the wake of Enron's collapse, systems of social disclosure deserve careful examination.

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9780815732341

Table of Contents

Reviews

In her thoroughly researched and well-written book, Democracy by Disclosure, Mary Graham uses three case studies to illustrate both the promises and serious problems inherent in government-mandated public disclosure of standardized information as one strategy for helping people reduce health and safety risks. To provide the greatest possible protection for the public, we need a resurgence in traditional regulation -- aided by the Internet and Graham's suggestions, including the matching of disclosure to risk and the designing of accurate metrics and reporting -- a more substantial implementation of democracy by disclosure. --Sidney M. Wolfe, M.D., Public Citizen Health Research Group, The New England Journal of Medicine, 5/8/2003 This book should be must reading for health administrators, policymakers, and consumers who are interested in reduction of risks to patients through transparency. --Charles J. Austin, Ph.D., University of Alabama at Birmingham, Inquiry, 1/1/2004

Author Information

Mary Graham, a visiting fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, is codirector of the Transparency Policy Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and president of the Governance Institute in Washington, D.C. She is the author of The Morning After Earth Day (Brookings/Governance Institute, 1999).

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