When Does Transparency Generate Legitimacy? Experimenting on a Context‐Bound Relationship

Abstract

We analyze the main rationale for public administrations and political institutions for supplying transparency, namely, that it generates legitimacy for these institutions. First, we discuss different theories of decision making from which plausible causal mechanisms that may drive a link between transparency and legitimacy may be derived. We find that the common notion of a straightforward positive correlation is naïve and that transparency reforms are rather unpredictable phenomena. Second, we test the effect of transparency on procedure acceptance using vignette experiments of representative decision making in schools. We find that transparency can indeed generate legitimacy. Interestingly, however, the form need not be "fishbowl transparency," with full openness of the decision-making process. Decision makers may improve their legitimacy simply by justifying carefully afterward the decisions taken behind closed doors. Only when behavior close to a deliberative democratic ideal was displayed did openness of the process generate more legitimacy than closed-door decision making with postdecisional justifications.

ynamic Transparency: An Audit of Mexico’s Freedom of Information Act 

“…Transparency is the disclosure of information about the decisions made, actions taken, and processes followed by the members of an organization for the purpose of having the performance of said organization evaluated (Moser, 2001;Meijer, 2013;De Fine Licht et al, 2014 (Lindstedt and Naurin, 2010). Because there is a risk that agents may deviate from official requirements, compliance is a particular challenge for this form of transparency.…”

Access to information in the UK and India

“…Even the seemingly clear case of trust decline created by the MPs' expenses scandal involves nuance, as the disclosure of Parliamentary corruption came as a confirmation rather than a revelation to many (Hansard Society 2010) and since 2009 levels of trust in MPs have now moved back upwards (Fox 2012). The idea that information equals increased trust over-simplifies the complex ways in which the public approaches politics and presumes a cognitive "blank slate" where there are in fact numerous biases, dissonance and expectations through which information is processed (De Fine Licht 2013: Grimmelikhaujsen 2012.…”

Análisis experimental de la corrupción y de las medidas anticorrupción. ¿Dónde estamos, hacia dónde vamos?

“…En un experimento con estudiantes de secundaria, De Fine Licht et al (2014) muestran que diferentes tipos de transparencia tienen un impacto diferente sobre la legitimidad percibida de un proceso de decisión. Los estudiantes leen diferentes escenarios sobre dos decisiones tomadas por su conferencia escolar.…”