An Analysis of the Level of Transparency of Federal Universities’ Websites in the South of Brazil

Abstract

The internet contributes for the reduction of information asymmetries between the government and the society through the transparency, because provides an environment of analysis and reflection through the information publicized by the public managers. At any level of the Public Administration, the management must be efficient and transparent, so, the general objective of this research is to verify the level of transparency of websites of the federal universities in the South of Brazil in the year of 2014 based on what the Brazilian legislation determines. Through adaptation and application of the model proposed by Nunes (2013) for measurement of the level of transparency based on the Brazilian legislation, this work seeks to providing contribution to the researches about transparency in the public sector. In the evaluation the information content, usability of the websites and data availability were considered, distributed in a set of 25 descriptors based on the Brazilian legislation. Based on the analysis made, it has been possible to find out that the group of universities analyzed showed good transparency practices. Globally three universities showed excellent transparency level; yet most universities have improvements to be made in their websites. Federal University of Santa Catarina stood out for reaching the highest transparency level among federal universities in the south. To enable the construction of a transparency map, for future works is recommended the use of the model in universities from other regions of the country.

Main factors influencing the digital transparency in higher education institutions

“…A few prior empirical studies on web disclosure have focused on HEIs (e.g., Crawford, 2012;Díaz et al, 2015;Kirchner et al, 2016;Saraite et al, 2018;Ramírez and Tejada, 2019). Among the existing studies, there are those that examine stakeholders' perceptions of the importance of web transparency (Evgenievich et al, 2015;Ramírez et al, 2016;Flórez et al, 2017); those that examine the actual web transparency carried out by the university, albeit focusing on one specific dimension such as the information contained on the web page (Crawford, 2012;Flórez et al, 2014;Brusca et al, 2019;Son-Turan and Lambrechts, 2020), E-services (Kim et al, 2014) or E-participation (Díaz et al, 2015;Li and Zhao, Rev.…”