Cohen Blog 2

         For this blog I wanted to find a connection between what we talked about in class about 

government accountability within democratic systems, the theory that democratic countries are 

much more likely to face repercussions for decisions than their autocratic or tyrannical 

counterparts, and ideas from my American Political Theory class where we discussed the 

importance of accountability of the government by the governed, being central to our 

Constitution and the American political system. Democratic governments are often forced to be 

largely transparent due to a legislative system that requires a politician to garner large popular 

support in order to come into power. In fact, the defenses for our constitution laid out in the 

Federalist Papers maintain that our democratic system relies on people being able to directly 

influence the government in order to ensure decisions are being made in the interest of the 

general public.

The hypothesis that I’d like to put forward is that, because of the implication of repercussions by the public, democratic governments could in fact be more likely to hide things from the people. Historically these things come in the form of military operations, aid, counterintelligence, etc. Most often these operations were carried out in order to secure “American interests” abroad, especially from 1950 to early 1990, with examples including Operation Silver, Operation Danube, Operation Brother Sam, Operation Pluto, and many others. The US has a long history of intervening and overthrowing democratically elected governments that didn’t support them, or supported their enemies. Events like these contradict two of the most key elements of American democracy and the basis it was founded on: Allowing the people to decide what is in their own best interest, and allowing people to choose who leads them. I’m not making the claim that the government can’t have secrets, in the interest of national security some things need to remain out of the public sphere. But these are examples of large scale events that would affect thousands of people both domestically and abroad, and the reason for the secrecy seems to be out of fear of a lack of public support, which would subsequently prevent these things from happening in the first place. 

If there is such a fear of repercussions, as there should be within a democracy, it begs the question of whether or not these decisions were truly in the best interests of the governed in the first place. The fear of transparency, while good at keeping politicians accountable in the scope of public, international politics where decisions are recorded and accessible to all, may have inadvertently incentivised decisions that are questionably in the best interest of the American public to remain secret.