Factors of Proactive Disclosure of Information at the Local Level

Abstract

In our paper, we concentrate on proactive transparency, provision of data without prior information requests. To do so, we collected data from all 2,926 municipalities in Slovakia and analyze political, economic, and social factors that affect the proactive transparency of these local bodies. This case selection provides two advantages. First, we study a relatively new democracy, where proactive transparency has not been analyzed so far. Second, our sample size is substantially larger than samples in most existing studies, and unlike in the case of the majority of previous research, we focus on a country with a highly fragmented municipal structure, where most municipalities have a small population. We find that a higher population, lower unemployment and female municipal leadership enhance the level of proactive transparency. The results also show a connection between reactive and proactive transparency at the local level. In general, our findings indicate that municipalities with a small population face substantial obstacles in disclosing information to the public.

Keywords:

• governance
• information
• local politics
• municipality
• Slovakia
• transparency

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under Grant APVV-18-0218.

Notes on contributors

Jozef Zagrapan

Jozef Zagrapan is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, with a current focus mainly on Slovakia in cross-national comparative research.

Peter Spáč

Peter Spáč is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at Masaryk University. His research interests include electoral systems, political parties, and Slovak politics.