Transparency data and registers: instruments of government or scandal machines?

For 15 years, European transparency policy has mostly consisted in publicizing data on decision-making processes and on the actors they involved. Often presented as a mean to restore public trust in the EU, those data have been also perceived and used by pro-transparency NGOs as a way to reveal the EU system’s dysfunctions. This article analyses the socio-technical processes through which those data are defined, produced and made public, and the negotiations which they imply, revealing the different dimensions of this “government by transparency” and the ambivalence of “transparency” as a watchword. The article first studies how these processes and data shape the representation of the social phenomena that they intend to make visible: “the organized civil society” and its place in the European policy-making. It then shows how they have been instrumental in the enrollment of the actors targeted by this policy and especially of the most critical ones. Finally, the article focusses on their potential uses, as tools for advocacy or as professional resources for lobbyists.