Abstract

To what extent does transparency in foreign policy making matter to democratic publics? Scholars and policy makers posit a normative commitment to transparency in the conduct of foreign affairs, an assumption baked into many existing models of international politics. This article tests the existence of a “transparency norm” in international security using three original survey experiments about covert action. I recover attitudes toward covert operations by holding the circumstances and outcomes of conflicts constant and manipulating whether foreign involvement was kept secret from the American public. Then, I unpack an “ends” and “means” trade-off by exploring whether there are conditions under which secrecy in national security is unacceptable to the public, regardless of policy outcomes. The findings demonstrate that democratic publics have only a weak preference for transparency: they care substantially more about the outcomes of US foreign policy rather than the process by which the policy was created.