Group Politics and the Disclosure Idea

HE DISCLOSURE IDEA comes close to being all-purpose cleanser of American politics. Few general principles relating to conduct of our public life have been more often, more warmly, or more indiscriminately applauded. And none has been more thoroughly engulfed in a swirl of earnest nonsense. American legislatures have been enacting disclosure laws of various kinds for more than seventy years, but there is little agreement as to what these efforts have accomplished, and even less as to purposes or values they might ideally serve. Disclosure is a litany which almost everyone chants but hardly anyone bothers to study. This paper seeks to chip away at deficiency. What follows has been drawn principally from state and federal experience with those disclosure requirements that have been applied to i.e., relatively direct persuasive relationships between non-legislators and legislators. Our main concern is not with these laws qua laws, although from this perspective they are tempting targets. Nor is it with comparative superiority (or inferiority) of disclosure to other approaches to the group problem, however this may be defined. Our concern, rather, is with circumstances that have produced these laws, with expectations that have surrounded them, and with their operating efficiency and consequences. In short, where and how do these laws fit into political process, and what do they achieve there? The findings are confined to lobbying, but in view of general enthusiasm that disclosure idea continues to generate, they may not be entirely devoid of broader interest. Although their reach and context differ widely, disclosure requirements or proposals of any kind unavoidably proceed from same introductory premise: only men had access to facts... . If disclosure as applied to lobbying has been a somewhat special case, there is still no canon against using it to cast whatever light it can in other corners. And if, as we believe, our lobbying laws have failed, we ought at least to reckon with fact and implications of their failure. The problem with which they are ultimately concerned, that of maintaining optimum distance between public and private power, is as old as government itself, and values which they embody lie close enough to heart of our tradition to justify hard inquiry beneath pietistic crust that has too long hidden them from view

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