Explaining the transparency of local government websites through a political market framework

Abstract

This paper contributes to the literature on government transparency by addressing the question of what drives the differences in local government levels of transparency. Our main objective is to ascertain whether transparency is mainly driven by the leadership, capacity and other political traits of the local governments themselves-"supply-side determinants"-or, rather, if it hinges on social, cultural and/or other local community factors ("demand-side" determinants). We test the hypotheses derived from this theoretical framework using the results of the Municipal Transparency Index which is based on the information disclosed in the local governments' official websites and was applied to all Portuguese municipalities for the first time in 2013. Our findings indicate that municipalities with less financial autonomy, run by male mayors, with a larger number of consecutive terms in office, and larger margins of victory in local elections display lower levels of transparency. On the demand-side, the unemployment rate and the average age of the municipal population emerge as the best predictors and are both negatively associated with transparency.

Success Factors Influencing Citizens’ Adoption of IoT Service Orchestration for Public Value Creation in Smart Government

“…Transparency empowers citizens in the government accountability process [90], engendering trust in government. Through the use of ICT technology, government information and decisions can be made public without any particular hindrance, increasing the culture of transparency [91]. Transparency is the focal point of citizens' trust in government [132], and decision transparency helps trust flourish.…”

Financial Transparency in the Web 2.0 Era. An Analysis of the use of Websites and Social Media by Spanish Municipalities

“…They cover only 5 items related to financial transparency and show a very limited use of SM for financial reporting. Decisive reasons for fluctuations in levels of transparency have not been found (Bearfield & Bowman, 2017;Tavares & da Cruz, 2017), but population size, income per capita and political factors are usually significant in Spanish municipalities (Alcaide et al, 2017). A study analyzing Facebook use by the biggest local governments in Italy and Spain for information disclosure purposes (Guillamón et al, 2016) also found that population size and citizens' income level, together with the level of e-participation and indebtedness, influence the level of municipal transparency through SM.…”

Transparency, Policy Outcomes, and Incumbent Support

“…Adding unemployment or debt per capita as explanatory variable has no relevant impact on our conclusions. Adding the average age of the municipal population (which Tavares and da Cruz forthcoming, have shown to be correlated with MTI) or the proportion of elderly people in the population has no impact either. Because the proportion of the youth population could be correlated with the importance attached to exam grades, we also controlled for this variable, but nothing changed.…”

“…For example, Arvate et al () show that, in Brazil, deficits are electorally punished in states with higher than average schooling years, while Bojar () shows that high‐status individuals (a measure that includes education) are less likely to punish deficit reductions or to reward spending increases. Furthermore, although existing evidence on the determinants of MTI for Portugal counters that hypothesis (Tavares and da Cruz forthcoming), one could even argue that government transparency is itself a consequence of an electorate with greater levels of education. Therefore, we also estimate models including a variable measuring the percentage of the population in each municipality with college education, also estimating its interaction with the fiscal performance variables.…”