Can Transparency Foster More Understanding and Compliant Citizens?

Abstract

Voluntary policy compliance is an important yet rarely studied topic in public administration. To address the paucity of research, this article proposes and empirically tests a conceptual framework that ties policy transparency and policy understanding to voluntary policy compliance intentions. The reasoning is that the extent to which citizens understand a policy contributes to their intentions to comply with that policy. Further, the authors argue that policy transparency indirectly influences voluntary policy compliance intentions through a positive effect on citizens' levels of policy understanding. To enhance the validity of the findings, the authors assess these relationships across two policy domains. The findings reflect an indirect positive effect of transparency on voluntary compliance occurring through policy understanding. However, this emerged only for one policy domain. These results suggest that the effects of policy transparency on policy understanding and voluntary policy compliance intentions may depend on the policy domain.Acknowledging these important gaps in transparency and compliance research, the objective of this article is to examine how government transparency shapes citizens' voluntary policy compliance. As we will explain in greater detail later, voluntary policy compliance can be understood as citizens' willingness to comply with a government request related to a particular policy. In addressing our research objective,

The Impact of Transparency on the Citizen Participation in Decision- Making at the Municipal Level in Romania

“…Grimmelikhuijsen (2009) and Curtin and Meijer (2006) argued that increased transparency might lower trust in government because it might expose its unlawful activity that can be criticized. According to O'Neil apud Porumbescu et al (2017), transparency could conduct to information overload, generate confusion and therefore uncertainty. Garrido-Rodriguez et al (2017) pointed that greater governmental transparency might reduce its legitimacy.…”

“…Publishing a great deal of information does not mean being more transparent (Grimmelikhuijsen, 2012), because the disclosed information should be accessible and relevant for citizens (Cucciniello and Nasi, 2014;Park and Blenkinsopp, 2017;Heimstädt and Dobusch, 2018), meaning that the information should be "complete, verifiable, accurate, balanced, comparable, clear, timely, and reliable" (Rawlins apud Park and Blenkinsopp, 2017). In addition, citizens should be able to understand the information disclosed (Porumbescu et al, 2017), therefore it is equally important how the information is presented to the public. Prechal and Leeuw (2007) highlight that public institutions should have clear procedures for disclosing public information, as well as clear and predictable channels for collecting information from citizens.…”

“…In addition, the research found the more confidence citizens had in their local officials, the less they were interested in fiscal and good government transparency. Porumbescu et al (2017) showed that the way in which the information is presented facilitates greater understanding of public institutions, and therefore the intention to comply. They also found that policy domain influences the degree of understanding of the information.…”

“…Transparency is a desired principle of good governance and an instrument for reducing corruption, and increasing trust in government and accountability of public officials (Grimmelikhuijsen, 2009;Meijer, 2009). Even though its benefits are much praised, they are rather overrated (Porumbescu et al, 2017) and difficult to achieve.…”

Can Government Communication Facilitate Policy Understanding Toward Energy Conservation? Evidence from an Old Industrial Base in China

“…Consequently, it is highly possible that the private enterprises lack an understanding of what the energy conservation policy is about, how the policy benefits their enterprises and the society at large, and how to adopt energy-saving techniques in practical production processes. According to Porumbescu et al: "a lack of [policy] understanding is problematic because it can result in a low level of voluntary policy compliance" [10,11]. In this sense, the uninformed private enterprises may hinder the effective implementation of the energy conservation policy intentionally or unintentionally.…”