Secret deliberation often produces better institutional decisions than public openness does.

Evidence

Finally, in many contexts, it seems only reasonable that the underlying messiness of an institution’s deliberations should be concealed lest it lead to conflict and complications. For example, a jury should arguably deliberate outside the public eye. The National Academy of Sciences in the United States was recently burdened by the general requirement of public openness under the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act. Such openness would make it, in the view of many, virtually impossible to reach reasonable judgments about scientific matters of public importance that affect specific interests. … A standard argument in defense of the secrecy of the deliberations of the U.S. Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 is that openness would have been inflammatory and would have inhibited the serious, open debate necessary for working out a constitutional arrangement. The results of those secret debates compare favorably with those of the virtually public debates of the revolutionary French parliament soon thereafter (Elster 2000). — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 452

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s trust/monitoring framework: secrecy of deliberation functions as a kind of insulated observability that permits candor, a counterpoint to openness-as-trust-substrate.
• SEED: Contrarian angle: the case for secrecy in deliberation — juries, constitutions, scientific advisory panels — against transparency doctrine.