> don't consider it "being monitored" when the person you're talking to is the one doing the recording
Compromise is reached in quiet, safe places. Politicians make bombastic statements for their base and donors, and then go behind closed doors to negotiate. You can't negotiate in earnest if every offer for compromise you put forward immediately results in (a) the losers of that compromise creating a ruckus and (b) your opponent using (a) to weaken you.
Public negotiations reward playing to the audience. (You see this in small groups–letting leaders or the people in a friend group who disagree pull aside almost always solves the problem better than litigating it as a group.) If every conversation might be recorded for replaying to a third party, then every conversation will be treated as an open one. That destroys room for compromise.
> Compromise is reached in quiet, safe places. Politicians make bombastic statements for their base and donors, and then go behind closed doors to negotiate.
That may be. But corruption also festers in quiet safe places. It's not clear to me that the the tradeoff is worth it.
> corruption also festers in quiet safe places. It's not clear to me that the the tradeoff is worth it.
Public legislating, private bargaining [1]. This keeps substantive deliberation in the public domain while the horse trading, the job republics delegate to elected representatives, has a limited space within which it can efficiently engage.
This seems like a weak argument since compromise may be more difficult, but it certainly isn't impossible when conversations are transparent. Eventually the "losers" of a compromise are going to learn about how their elected officials voted and what the impact of that vote will be for them, and they'll hold their elected officials accountable for it regardless.
It just isn't worth forcing every person to give up the ability to protect themselves by recording their everyday conversations just so that politicians can lie to the public and their donors while screwing over the people behind closed doors.
Legislative deliberation, i.e. hashing out details, should be open [1]. At the bargaining phase, when you're working out high-level frameworks, the theory says closed doors win [2]. (Put another way, in a transparent bargaining environment, the winning move is to ignore your opponent and beat your drums to your base.)
> Eventually the "losers" of a compromise are going to learn about how their elected officials voted
The point is to let both sides table ideas without having to face the downside. To propose what if scenarios to the other side.
That cuts two ways. If everything they said was on the record there would be no point in putting on a show since it will immediately turn out the show is all fake.
Imagine if politicians acted like normal people, negotiating things in nuance instead of being showmen.
Don't blame the politicians. Blame the people who have opinions. The public debate is so dominated by bad-faith arguments that it's not productive to treat it as a real debate. Until the social consequences of arguing in bad faith are severe enough, all meaningful political discussion must happen off the record.
Compromise is reached in quiet, safe places. Politicians make bombastic statements for their base and donors, and then go behind closed doors to negotiate. You can't negotiate in earnest if every offer for compromise you put forward immediately results in (a) the losers of that compromise creating a ruckus and (b) your opponent using (a) to weaken you.
Public negotiations reward playing to the audience. (You see this in small groups–letting leaders or the people in a friend group who disagree pull aside almost always solves the problem better than litigating it as a group.) If every conversation might be recorded for replaying to a third party, then every conversation will be treated as an open one. That destroys room for compromise.