Central Government Strategies to Promote Local Governments’ Transparency: Guidance or Enforcement?

Abstract

The push to make governments more transparent extends worldwide, as transparency is expected to boost citizens’ trust in government and participation in public affairs. Recent transparency laws and open-government initiatives have encouraged local governments to share more information with their constituents. A growing number of recent studies have investigated the drivers of local governments’ transparency, but have not yet addressed the role of higher levels of government in making local governments more transparent. In light of implementation scholarship arguing the success of centrally designed programs is a function of higher-level involvement, this study contributes to the transparency literature by approaching local governments’ transparency as an intergovernmental implementation process. We assess the explanatory power of two central government strategies: enforcement mechanisms and central government guidance on Chilean municipalities’ transparency levels. Results show that both types of central government strategies can have a substantial impact on transparency over time.

Keywords:

• implementation
• local governments
• open government
• transparency

View correction statement:

Correction

Notes

Notes

1 http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2014/12/09/actualidad/1418158222_717997.html

2 The categories that comprise the index are: municipal ordinances and other legal documents; municipal attributions; organizational structure; employees’ contracts and salaries; acquisitions and bidding processes; monetary transfers to other organizations; actions with effects on third parties; online services; subsidies and benefits; mechanisms for citizens’ participation; budgets; external auditing; and participation in other organizations.

3 The correlation between legislative support and electoral competitiveness is not as strong as we can expect due to the characteristics of the party system in Chile. A significant proportion of the mayors come from independent and minor parties, but not so many council members do so. This happens partially because the council members’ seats are assigned using the D’Hondt method, which assigns seats proportionally to the coalition votes. This does not create incentives to minor parties and independent candidates to compete for council member election.

4 Grimmelikhuijsen and Feeney (2017) find evidence that less politicized environments have an increased adoption of online open government, as mayors with higher administrative professionalism influence transparency positively. However, their measure of politicized environments is different from political competition. They measure the type of government in the city: council-manager and mayor-council.