“IT’S BEEN YEARS since legislative democracy truly flourished at the State House,” the Boston Globe editorial board sighed in exasperation a few weeks ago.

For more than a decade, Globe editorials have been denouncing the Legislature’s m.o., which was fashioned by Democratic supermajorities in both House and Senate: consolidate power within a small group of lawmakers and let them wield it outside of public view.

So far, there’s not much to show for these reprimands. A 2012 editorial, “Beacon Hill leaders stifle debate among legislators,” still sounds pretty familiar in 2023: “the concentration of power in the hands of the House speaker and Senate president has had a strangulating effect on democratic decision-making.”

It’s getting increasingly hard even to imagine an alternative to this buttoned-up way of legislating, which has been the status quo since at least the time of House Speaker Bob DeLeo, who’s described in a Globe editorial as having perfected the art of making it “impossible to know what an individual legislator really said or did.” (DeLeo once disputed the accusation that his leadership style was undemocratic by denying the very premise that lawmaking happens in public. I’m a consensus builder, he said, adding that it’s “not very uncommon that I would have anywhere from two people to 20 people in my office to try to work consensus out.”)

But the Globe isn’t giving up on this fight, and its rebukes are getting sharper. Recent editorials have mocked the lawmakers who lined up behind Ron Mariano for Speaker as “the sheeple” and derided the Legislature’s frequently-unanimous roll call votes as “North Korean-esque.”

Last year, when the House did hold an actual debate before a roll call vote (120-36, in favor of a bill allowing undocumented residents to get drivers’ licenses), the Globe’s reaction came heavily salted with sarcasm: “Something rare is scheduled to occur on Beacon Hill on Wednesday…Shocking, indeed, given that one longstanding tradition on Beacon Hill is a tendency to hammer out policy behind closed doors and then hold pro forma, unanimous votes to approve it.”

In this most recent scolding, the Globe contrasted the barrenness of present-day lawmaking with what it regards as a paragon of legislative democracy: the summer of 1981, when the Legislature was grappling with the budgetary repercussions of Proposition 2½, the tax-cutting law that the voters had approved the previous November.

The editorial is a sentimental journey back in time, starting with its plaintive subtitle — “The older ways were really the better ways.” And it’s a flowery one – the State House was a place of “passionate, sometimes even raucous” debate, where “the sometimes earnest, other times ardent voices of state senators and representatives regularly drew interested observers to the House and Senate visitors’ galleries.”

A legislative democracy, we learn, has drama and suspense (the outcomes are not foreordained – a revolt on the House floor!), and it makes for an engaging and crowd-pleasing spectacle (interested observers in the galleries, and reporters, advocates, and lobbyists, who “mingled in the hallways during the afternoons and evenings – and sometimes late into the night – as legislators debated”).

Alas, the party’s over, for the time being at least: the “marble halls are now empty.” But a return to legislative grandeur is still possible, we’re told: lawmakers can and should take back the power that they’ve surrendered.

Really, the sheeple are capable of that? For that matter, could any institution turn the clock back some 42 years?

The Globe is certainly a different creature now than it was then — the pages and pages of classified ads that used to fatten Sunday editions have decamped to Craigslist, and profits are now tallied in electronic clicks, which “softer” news can encourage. (In the three and a half years since Tom Brady left the Patriots, his name has appeared in 1,677 Globe stories, House Speaker Ron Mariano’s name in 313, Senate President Karen Spilka’s name in 279.)

The 1981 budget drama that the editorial extols made the Globe’s front page nearly every other day in June and July of that year. Seven different reporters filed 32 stories on the subject, with headlines ranging from “Faltering House budget delayed for revision,” to “State Senate panel wields sharp ax,” through “Talks break off,” and “Fallout from the struggle.”

Compare that output to the Globe’s coverage of the Legislature in June and July of last year, which, under rules adopted in 1995, are two of the Legislature’s busiest months. Controversial amendments from the governor’s office prolonged the budget process, a tax cut bill near enactment was suddenly derailed by an obscure law from 36 years before, and US Supreme Court decisions on abortion and guns forced the rethinking of state laws on those subjects. Yet even with all this activity, the Globe ran only half as many front-page State House stories as it did in 1981.

That type of retrenchment can transform how business is done on Beacon Hill. Public institutions and players are much more likely to maintain open and transparent proceedings when lots of eyes are on them.

The Globe is hardly alone in its retreat from State House coverage. The upheavals that have gutted the business model that long supported newspapers have caused similar pullbacks at outlets across the state and country, not to mention the shuttering of hundreds of papers.

But this recent Globe trip on the Wayback Machine suggests a possibility that its editorial melancholy about our degraded legislative democracy hasn’t yet considered: Has the downsized State House coverage by the Globe itself helped to bring about this lamentable state of affairs?

Margaret Monsell, a former assistant attorney general and former general counsel to the state Senate Committee on Ways and Means, is an attorney practicing in the Boston area.