House chambers. (SHNS)

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 progressive advocacy groups to the Republican gubernatorial nominee, critics argue that we suffer from an opaque state government, and if we just knew more about what happens inside the State House, we would get better policies.

Unfortunately, this diagnosis is flawed, so the 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.

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

In 2014, political scientists David Broockman and Christopher Skovron asked thousands of state legislative candidates and sitting legislators to estimate their constituents’ views and then compared what they said to what the voters themselves reported. By and large, legislators considered their constituents to be significantly more conservative than they actually were.

Related research by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Matto Mildenberger, and Leah Stokes showed that senior staff in Congress consistently misjudged constituent opinion.

Why? One reason might be that the neighbors most likely to show up at community meetings, to head up to the State House, to make political donations, or to be represented by lobbyists tend to be systematically wealthier and better educated than their neighbors who don’t, and their policy preferences aren’t representative.

It is hard to serve people well when you do not know what they want.

To fix this problem, polling can help—but not polling on what the average Massachusetts voter thinks. Information on statewide voter preferences is almost meaningless if you are elected to serve the people of a few neighborhoods in Boston, a town or two on the South Shore, or several rural communities in Central Mass. The solution is district-level opinion data. In a promising experiment in 2008, political scientists gave district-level polling data to legislators in New Mexico and watched them vote more closely with their districts’ actual opinion than a control group that didn’t get the data.

Bay State polling firms and nonprofits, its news media, and university pollsters should upgrade their work to routinely offer poll numbers for all 200 legislative districts. This used to be prohibitively expensive, but new data analysis tools, modeling techniques, and online panels can bring the costs of this kind of survey data into a reasonable range. Philanthropists who want more responsive government should invest to make this happen.

Still, high-performing government requires more than clear information channels. It requires consequences for performance that fails to address public concerns.

To increase consequences, the essential task is to convince more people to run for the Legislature. In 2024, according to Ballotpedia, only one in five Massachusetts legislative districts featured a competition with candidates from both major parties—the lowest rate in America. The state has ranked last in Ballotpedia’s competitiveness index for five straight election cycles.

It’s common sense: In a state with so little competition, challengers serve voters just by showing up. Incumbents who face no challengers act differently than those who do. Even token challengers make incumbents work. Frequently, after defeating a challenge, incumbents will adopt some of their opponent’s issues.

Ballot initiatives and state constitutional amendments also add consequences. Legislators, of course, would prefer that the Legislature be, for all intents and purposes, “the room where it happens” when it comes to public decisions that matter. If they haven’t acted in a prior year, putting a measure on the ballot is a powerful prod. The Bay State’s first-in-the-nation comprehensive health care law passed in 2006 in part because civic leaders had gathered enough signatures to threaten the Legislature’s primacy in policymaking with both a constitutional amendment and a ballot initiative.

This year will see a bumper crop of nine ballot questions. But ordinary citizens can be hard-pressed to understand what ballot language actually means and might be persuaded by whichever side has better advertising and deeper pockets.

A Massachusetts Ballot Initiative Institute might help. It could house a Citizen Initiative Review Commission, a jury of randomly selected citizens, who could listen to the sides for and against current initiatives facing voters and create short, plain-language video explainers. This is a logical 21st-century upgrade to supplement the dated but helpful paper guides that the Commonwealth mails to every voter. (A pilot in Oregon shows this model is worth exploring.)

Such an institute could also work proactively. By bringing together ordinary citizens, community groups, businesses, and nonprofits across economic strata and social and political divisions, the group might aim to formulate thoughtful and innovative potential future ballot measures and offer them to the Legislature for action – and to the public, the press, and the philanthropic community for follow-through should the Legislature fail to act.

The path forward is long. Yet whether you would give today’s Legislature a grade of A+, F, or anywhere in between, we can all agree that improvement is possible, and worth it. Improving state legislative performance could mean a better social return on the state’s $60 to $70 billion annual budget, and more effective lawmaking on issues that shape our economy and our communities.

As a reformer, I thought the fix was making the Legislature visible to the people. Fifteen years later, I see that making the people visible to the Legislature is equally crucial, if not more so.

Avi Green is a policy consultant and philanthropic advisor.