Compromise is reached in quiet, safe places. Politicians make bombastic statements for their base and donors, and then go behind closed doors to negotiate. You can't negotiate in earnest if every offer for compromise you put forward immediately results in (a) the losers of that compromise creating a ruckus and (b) your opponent using (a) to weaken you.
Public negotiations reward playing to the audience. (You see this in small groups–letting leaders or the people in a friend group who disagree pull aside almost always solves the problem better than litigating it as a group.) If every conversation might be recorded for replaying to a third party, then every conversation will be treated as an open one. That destroys room for compromise.
It just isn't worth forcing every person to give up the ability to protect themselves by recording their everyday conversations just so that politicians can lie to the public and their donors while screwing over the people behind closed doors.
> Eventually the "losers" of a compromise are going to learn about how their elected officials voted
The point is to let both sides table ideas without having to face the downside. To propose what if scenarios to the other side.
[1] https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/api-gateway/apsa/assets...
Imagine if politicians acted like normal people, negotiating things in nuance instead of being showmen.
That may be. But corruption also festers in quiet safe places. It's not clear to me that the the tradeoff is worth it.
Public legislating, private bargaining [1]. This keeps substantive deliberation in the public domain while the horse trading, the job republics delegate to elected representatives, has a limited space within which it can efficiently engage.
Speaking as someone who often has to tell people "Email that to me or I won't remember it", I can see the utility without it being intrusive.