Evaluating and fostering transparency in local administrations

Abstract

Evaluating and fostering transparency in local administrations. The methods used to evaluate the transparency of local administrations present notable differences that are influenced by national legislation and administrative characteristics. Consequently, it is difficult to formulate a valid international procedure to obtain a global picture. We have conducted a comparative analysis of the procedure developed by Transparency and Integrity in Portugal with that designed by the Laboratory of Journalism and Communication for Plural Citizenry in Spain. The results reveal that the approaches, maintained in various disciplines, exhibit notable but complementary differences. In the conclusions we propose new elements to design a method based on a syntax of transparency and order of fundamental elements. keywords: transparency; evaluation method, public communication, local administrations.Avaliação e proteção da transparência em administrações locais. Os métodos utilizados para avaliar a transparência nas administrações locais apresentam notórias diferenças que são influenciadas por fatores como a legislação nacional e as características administrativas. Por conseguinte, é difícil estabelecer um procedimento internacional que se mostre válido para a obtenção de uma imagem global. Conduzimos uma análise comparativa dos procedimentos desenvolvidos pela Transparência e Integridade em Portugal, com aqueles desenvolvidos em Espanha pelo Laboratório de Jornalismo e Comunicação para a Cidadania Plural. Os resultados revelam que as abordagens de diversas matérias, exibem diferenças simultaneamente notáveis e complementares. Nas conclusões, propomos a introdução de novos elementos com o intuito de desenvolver um método baseado numa sintaxe da transparência e na ordem de elementos fundamentais. palavras-chave: transparência; método de avaliação; comunicação pública; administrações locais.

Transparency for Participation through the Communication Approach

“…This method was adapted to apply it also to the cases of Ecuador [29] and Colombia [30]. This involved studying the legislation regarding the organization of public administrations, transparency and the right of access to information in those countries, evaluating the transparency and quality of the information published on their websites and carrying out a comparative analysis with other evaluation procedures of active transparency in local administrations of other countries based on diverse disciplinary approaches [31], using both published studies [32] and the sites where national and international organizations present their results and methods.…”

Inovações no poder local em Portugal: contribuições para a democracia local

“…As far as transparency is concerned, our research has revealed that only 55.2% of municipal websites display their mayors' biographies and 96% publish council meetings official records. There is still some work to be done regarding councillors' income declarations (only 8.4% display them) and financial transparency (for more statistics see Tavares and Sousa, 2018;Rodríguez-Navas and Breijo, 2019). Definitely a high percentage of municipal representatives don't believe in the concept of open data.…”

Health Transparency and Communication on the Government Websites of Ibero-American Countries: The Cases of Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Spain

“…These results indicate the importance of institutional and other economic factors that can hinder the implementation of digital strategies. In addition, in such national comparisons, the importance of analytical bias deriving from applying methodologies designed on the basis of the political sciences or from a communicative perspective has been observed [21].…”