Reforming the Public Sector: How to Achieve Better Transparency, Service, and Leadership

2. Making Transparency Transparent: An Assessment Model for Local Governments

Transparency in government is a highly regarded value, often studied by academics and emphasized by practitioners. In the literature, transparency is discussed as a tool to enhance governments’accountability, as a principle to activate for reducing public administration corruption, and as a way to distribute information on government’s performance. Despite these different concepts, most studies operate on a common underlying assumption: that transparency in government is a critical ingredient for efficient and well-functioning economic and political markets. More generally, transparency is seen as a cornerstone of democracy. In fact, the claim for the need for a transparent government was embedded in the modern idea of democracy at its birth.1 Many countries, including Italy, refer to transparency in their constitutions and emphasize its application—mainly in terms of free access to information and openness—as underlying principles of their legal systems. However, according to David Heald, “Transparency is widely canvassed as a key to better governance, increasing trust in public office holders. But transparency is more often preached than practised, more often referred to than defined, and more often advocated than critically analysed.”2 This thought finds support in literature where different studies present and discuss theoretical models and practical findings that focus on single dimensions of transparency.3 In this chapter we construct an assessment framework aimed at measuring the degree of transparency in government on the basis of the multiple dimensions that can be analyzed, using primarily information published on the governments ’ websites. For this purpose we review literature about transparency 26 2 Making Transparency Transparent: An Assessment Model for Local Governments maria cucciniello, greta nasi, and raffaella saporito in government and focus on studies from different disciplines and fields that describe transparency’s meaning and applications in the public sector. The framework has been tested on a purposive sample consisting of the twenty-one Italian regional capitals. The results show that these municipalities tend to distribute mainly information that they are required to publish to comply with the requirements of the law. They also seem to be more interested in publishing information about their functioning than about their performance. This chapter is organized into six sections. Section 2 describes the literature about transparency in government, section 3 presents the assessment model, section 4 describes the methods, and the last two sections present and discuss findings, draw some conclusions, and make recommendations. Literature Review: Theories and Previous Studies The principle of transparency is regarded as having great value in government as a means to enhance and reinforce the relationship between public administrations and their external stakeholders. Many researchers have been focusing on this topic, adopting different disciplinary approaches and investigating different streams of research. Some main considerations derive from a review of the growing body of literature about transparency in government. First, despite the existence of a few important efforts to provide unambiguous terminology concerning transparency, there is a great variety of studies that use different definitions and meanings of this principle.4 Second, in recent years, many studies have focused on the relationship between the use of information and communication technologies by governments as tools to enhance the level of transparency in government. These studies assume that these technologies—especially the websites of public administrations—reduce all barriers to government accessibility, including time and spatial ones.5 Third, some studies attempt to understand the degree of transparency in different types of government, presenting both theoretical frameworks and empirical evidences.6 Most of them focus on single dimensions of transparency , mainly on the degree of information accessibility about missionrelated tasks and services, or on their use of resources and the degree of financial accountability. However, a common point is that all of these studies focus on assessing websites, which they consider to be the main tool to evaluate the level of transparency of public administrations. Here we identify and discuss the main branches of the literature on transparency , in order to construct our own assessment framework. Making Transparency Transparent: Model for Local Governments 27 What Is Transparency? More information allows better analysis, better monitoring, and evaluation of events, all of which are significant to people’s economic and social well-being.7 It is a fact that information is a key factor for all types of organizations. Private organizations consider it a strategic variable to maintain and enhance their innovation capacity, which is considered crucial for surviving in markets .8 For public administrations, information...