Measuring Local Government Transparency

Abstract

Despite the importance of government transparency to promote accountability and prevent maladministration, empirical research has failed to produce proper tools to assess and compare government transparency practices. Most contributions to the topic do not address it from a stakeholder’s perspective, particularly in selecting the indicators to include in transparency indexes. This paper contributes to the debate by developing a municipal transparency index based on information available on local government official websites. The methodological approach borrows insights from the decision analysis literature to structure the index through a participatory process. An application to the Portuguese local government setting is briefly discussed.

Key words:

• Informing citizens
• local governance
• transparency indexes
• websites

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank TIAC’s research team for putting together the data used in this paper, particularly Vitor Teixeira and Cátia Andrade for their dedication and assistance. Needless to say, that all usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

1 It should be noted, however, that the specific context needs to be taken into account. Whereas e-governance and the disclosure of information online may be preferable in developed countries (i.e. wherever the access to and use of ICTs is widespread), the same may not apply in many jurisdictions where info-exclusion is present.

2 The 2012 version of the Spanish Transparency Index for municipalities introduced some changes. The tool has now six dimensions although it still includes 80 indicators (some are new whereas others were eliminated). The last version (2014) also uses 6 dimensions and 80 indicators (again with very few substitutions when compared to 2012).

3 As in other transparency indexes, these ‘indicators’ consist of binary variables that take the value of ‘1’ when the respective information item is available in the municipality website and take the value of ‘0’ when the item is not available in the website.

4 Local governments are legally required to disclose some of the information items included in the final list of underlying indicators but not all. Indeed, the ‘legal requirement’ of disclosure was not a crucial factor for the AG during the selection of the indicators. The objective of the MTI was not to assess the degree of compliance with the law. Therefore, although taking into account the legal requirements and other international indexes, the final set of MTI indicators encompasses items that were deemed to be important for local government transparency according to the technical expertise of the AG members.

5 For example, all items included in the Economic and Financial Transparency dimension are mandatory by law.

6 To curb the number of ‘determinant’ indicators, it was suggested to the group that they should not exceed 25 per cent of the total number of indicators in each dimension. The different views on which indicators should be classified as ‘determinant’ were discussed and resolved on the spot to develop a sense of common purpose (da Cruz and Marques 2013). The ‘determinant’ indicators are identified in the list provided in the Appendix.

7 Moreover, since the AG selected the same reference levels for all dimensions, one can immediately interpret the meaning of the overall (i.e. aggregate) MTI score: the best performers in terms of transparency are above the ‘good’ level (64 points), whereas the municipalities with scores below the ‘acceptable’ level (36 points) represent the worst practices (again, according to the preferences of the AG members).