Middleboro Review 2: Why the Beacon Hill transparency debate gets it all wrong

Sunday, September 20, 2026

Why the Beacon Hill transparency debate gets it all wrong

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Why the Beacon Hill transparency debate gets it all wrong

September 20, 2026

By Avi Green

For the past few years, one of the central debates in Massachusetts politics has been the fight over transparency. From the Democratic state auditor to the progressive advocacy group Act on Mass to GOP gubernatorial nominee Mike Minogue, critics argue that if we just knew more about what happens inside the State House, we would get better policies.

Unfortunately, this diagnosis is flawed, so its prescriptions are the wrong medicine for what ails our body politic.

Fundamentally, the problem is not that the public lacks crucial information about its government; it’s that its government lacks crucial information about the public -- and has little motivation to care about that. Members of the Legislature don’t actually know what their constituents want – at least, not on a systematic basis – and worse, they don’t need to care.

Sunshine is no cure-all. I should know. From 2006 to 2012, I led a Massachusetts-focused civic engagement organization. I was part of a coalition that brought online voter registration and voting machine audits to the Bay State, and I collaborated with community leaders on the 2011–12 legislative and congressional redistricting, arguing not just for better lines, but for deep public participation.

I got a lesson in the limits of the value of public disclosure when I was advocating for Election Day registration a decade ago. I learned that a listed cosponsor of the bill (a person now long retired) had signed on precisely so his name would be publicly listed – right out in the sun – and we advocates would praise him. All the while, he was quietly opposing the measure in the rooms where it mattered. Would posting this person’s office spending or his committee votes have made a difference? Of course not.

Activists argue that increased transparency will boost the power of everyday citizens. They recorded a big win in 2025 when new rules were adopted by the Legislature that mandate streaming every hearing and posting every committee vote. Yet citizen volunteers do not have the bandwidth to sit through every meeting or analyze thousands of votes. Professional lobbyists do.

Journalists, activists, and even AI bots can help. They can go through the newly open data and report it to the public. But most Bay Staters aren’t reading local newspapers regularly to begin with (if there is even still a robust local paper serving their community), nor are we actively participating in community organizations at the levels that characterized earlier generations. This means, unfortunately, there aren’t enough readers for these new transparency reports. The reform might be a win, but it will not be transformative.

And there are tradeoffs involved in making public every step of the legislative process. It is essential that many meetings are held in public. But public meetings also incline leaders to perform for the cameras, preventing them from asking colleagues key questions like, “Let’s say I give a little on topic A that I’ve been so committed to – what would you give me on topic B?” Those kinds of freewheeling discussions are essential to finding commonsense solutions and necessitate some limits on transparency.

None of this is an argument against making more information available to the public. But if the goal is to have a Legislature that is more responsive to constituent views, what we need most are better ways for lawmakers to know what voters want and incentives that increase legislators’ accountability for addressing those concerns. That is, the Legislature will work better when voters have effective channels to tell legislators their preferences, backed up by consequences that kick in should they consistently ignore those preferences.

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In Massachusetts, it all starts with safe, reliable energy.

Legislators, it is true, pay attention to their districts. But they are imperfect observers.