‘Transparency has not changed anything!’

When the Council of the European Union acts as a legislator, it has to comply with several regulations that aim to increase public information on legislative activity. This article attempts to explain how actors have implemented “transparency” rules and to what extent the latter have increased the democratic accountability of the national representatives. Empirical research reveals that the actors’ practices are decoupled from transparency rules. Furthermore, the legislative actors exploit transparency rules strategically. The neo-institutionalist concepts of organized hypocrisy and rule conversion allow us to explain these unintended effects of transparency rules.