In contrast to previous research that assumes away the usefulness of either national security secrecy or public accountability in democracies, this book attempts to understand the interconnections between secrecy and public consent in liberal states. The potential costs of revealing national security information to potential enemies and competitors necessitates executive discretion to keep secrets from the public. For this reason, all democracies around the world provide the executive with the discretion to keep national security secrets. However, executives can use their discretion to keep vi ... More

In contrast to previous research that assumes away the usefulness of either national security secrecy or public accountability in democracies, this book attempts to understand the interconnections between secrecy and public consent in liberal states. The potential costs of revealing national security information to potential enemies and competitors necessitates executive discretion to keep secrets from the public. For this reason, all democracies around the world provide the executive with the discretion to keep national security secrets. However, executives can use their discretion to keep vital security vulnerabilities secret or they can abuse that discretion to cover up incompetence and corruption. The dilemma is that the public must choose which investments, policies, and politicians to support in a democracy, but the very existence of the capacity to keep secrets means that the public cannot be sure they have the facts to inform their decisions. This book illustrates that some, but not all, democracies around the world have innovated institutions that help to resolve this secrecy dilemma. These innovations take advantage of the fact that transparency costs decline over time and include legislative committee powers, freedom of information laws, and press freedom protections that specifically target national security information. This book presents the first evidence that national security oversight institutions, while imperfect, both constrain the executive from abuse and convince members of the public to be less skeptical of investments in security. Democratic foreign policy effectiveness depends not only on executive discretion to keep national security secrets, but also on effective retrospective oversight from outside the executive.