Proactive disclosure of public information: legislative choice worldwide

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: to identify legislators’ policy on the mandatory, online proactive disclosure of information; and to identify environmental influences on behaviour in this respect. To implement these proactive policies on transparency included in the legislative frameworks, internet websites are being used as a means of disseminating this proactive information. Design/methodology/approach To achieve these goals, by application of the theories used to analyse the causes of information disclosure, the authors first developed an index of online proactive disclosure; then, by means of a regression analysis, the authors examined and tested eight hypotheses related to environmental variables. Findings The results obtained show that legislators have chosen to require scant online proactive information on which to base institutional legitimacy, and that in this respect they are influenced by how long the previous laws have been in force, by the level of public sector borrowing and by the degree of political commitment among the population. Originality/value The results obtained from this study will provide valuable information for future legislators and for civil society about information policies, clarifying the amount and nature of information that, according to the authorities, should be disclosed without the need for prior request. The paper is also intended to stimulate the development of further research in this area, by showing how different economic, political, social, cultural and institutional contexts influence the decisions taken regarding the public information that must be reported proactively to stakeholders.

Factors in the adoption of open government initiatives in Spanish local governments

“…Research (Alcaide- Muñoz et al, 2017;García-Tabuyo, Saez-Martin, and Caba-Perez, 2017;Sáez-Martín et al, 2017) has showed that there is a positive relationship between municipal wealth and the online disclosure of public information and transparency. We will test hypotheses H 3.1. and H 3.2 as summarised in Table 1.…”

Scientific progress of fiscal transparency research at national governments level

“…The most often used data from the years 2008, 2010 and 2012, and there were no papers that used data from the last 3 years (2017-2019). The year of publication of the most recent paper in the sample is 2019, however the one that used the most recent data was García-Tabuyo et al (2017), who used data from 2016.…”

How strong is the integrity disclosure in Indonesian Province website?

“…One of the government's obligations in serving the community is to provide clear and concise information (Kurniawan et al, 2017). This corresponds to the purpose of the issuance of the Republic of Indonesia Presidential Instruction No 3 of 2003 concerning National Policies and Strategies for E-government Development that online information disclosure will encourage governments to make clear transparency and act for the public interest (García-Tabuyo et al, 2017). Therefore, it can be stated that information disclosure, both through regulations and online, is critical to deterring corruption in Indonesia.…”