Qualities of Information

Public organizations often engage in attempts to manage public perceptions of their performance. Accordingly, they often go to great lengths to carefully craft a message in order to win public support for a new policy or to avoid criticism for a failed policy by putting a positive spin on the information or omitting details that can be used to construe faults (Roberts, 2005). Research has shown that public agencies vary the degree of information they make public based on perceived threats to their organization's reputation (Gilad, Maor, & Bloom, in press). Attempts to manipulate information present the public with a distorted portrayal of the actions taken by their government and present challenges with respect to increasing public sector accountability. Acknowledging this, Grimmelikhuijsen (2012) proposes an initial framework for understanding the contribution of information made public by government to enhanced transparency by evaluating this information according to the criteria of completeness, usability, and color.

Completeness refers to balance, in the sense that information being made public presents external actors, such as citizens or interest groups, with an accurate portrayal of some event. Here it is important to draw a distinction between the completeness of information and quantity, because quantity of information means little to enhancing transparency if it focuses exclusively on specific aspects of a particular policy, while failing to discuss additional facets that may also be relevant to understanding the policy. For example, there may be ample information on the benefits of a proposed policy but little discussion of any potential drawbacks. Thus, the more balanced information is, the more likely it is to contribute toward better transparency.

Color refers to positive bias in the information that is made public. Some of this positive bias is systematic, in that freedom of information laws may forbid or complicate exposing information that casts some aspects of public sector performance in a less-than-favorable light (Roberts, 2005, cited in Grimmelikhuijsen, 2012). Additional research has suggested that information made public is often manipulated by government in order to emphasize the benefits or successes of a particular policy or deemphasize its shortcomings (Mahler & Reagan, 2007). This practice of “coloring” information made public detracts from transparency as it presents the public with a biased (or opaque) view of the internal workings of their public sector.

Usability relates to the timeliness of information and its understandability. In order for information made public by government to be useful, it must be presented while it is still relevant. Otherwise citizens' ability to observe and understand what those in the public sector are doing is diminished. As a result, the public's capacity to use the delinquent information to render their public sector accountable is reduced. Understandability refers to the ability to comprehend information that made public by the government. Highly technical interpretations of data would be difficult for the average citizen to understand and would therefore be of little use. Presenting information to the public in this manner would have little effect on transparency for the reason that most people would be unable to process the information.

Qualities of Institutional Relationships

Transparency not only depends on the information that is made public by the government, but is also influenced by rules and norms that form the foundation for nongovernmental actors' relationships with their government. Therefore, as Meijer (2013) explains, “Government transparency is constructed through complex interactions between a variety of political and social actors, within sets of formal and informal rules, and the availability of a variety of constantly evolving technologies” (p. 429). Implied here is that the rules and norms that emerge through repeated exchanges between various actors and their government will influence what information becomes public, how the information becomes public, and which actors have access to this information. We look at the influence of rules, norms and technology on transparency.

How Transparency Affects Public Management

Transparency is believed to contribute to public sector responsiveness through the disclosure of information that is necessary to hold government accountable. Bovens (2010) explains accountability as “a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain or justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgment, and the actor may face consequences” (p. 951). In this relationship, actor refers to a public sector institution or member of the public sector, and forum refers to the public. The public sector makes use of transparency to inform the public of its conduct so that the public can then evaluate the conduct and, through direct and indirect tools, impose consequences deemed appropriate. The idea is that by making this information public, different public interest groups will be better equipped to exert influence over their public sector (and thereby increasing accountability). Better accountability will likely result in the delivery of public goods and services that more closely align with citizens' preferences (enhancing responsiveness). There is also an indirect path that between enhanced transparency and public sector responsiveness. Through public disclosure of information, information asymmetries between citizens and their government are reduced, which serves as a disincentive for public officials to engage in activities that may deviate from public interest. Furthermore, the dissemination of such information can also contribute to more informed and careful assessments of public policy, which can also encourage improved public sector performance (Porumbescu, 2013). These arguments, taken together, lay the foundation for attempts to link transparency, accountability, and public sector responsiveness to greater transparency to good governance.

Does transparency enhance public sector accountability and responsiveness? And if so, do more transparent governments perform better and more democratically than less transparent governments? Addressing these questions underscores a need to visit a broader and more fundamental debate in the public management literature relating to the notion of bureaucratic autonomy. Bureaucrats require some degree of discretion to make full and efficient use of their expertise, which means that monitoring mechanisms must be in place to ensure that bureaucrats, who are often not directly accountable to the citizens they serve, are nevertheless working in their interest. Attempts to enhance transparency constitute a move to reduce bureaucratic autonomy as they represent an expansion of external oversight of public bureaucracy, with the desired effect of ensuring that the work of bureaucracy aligns with the needs of the community it serves. Indeed, such was the reasoning behind the new public management reform (NPM) trend, which largely centered on enhancing external accountability of public organizations, often through means such as enhanced transparency (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004).

Empirical research investigating links between transparency, accountability and public sector responsiveness has uncovered interesting relationships. Im et al. (2013) found that an initiative to enhance the transparency of the Seoul Metropolitan Government in South Korea across the board resulted in selective responsiveness on the part of the mayor's office. Specifically, citizens' attempts to hold their government accountable, following their exposure to information afforded to them by this policy, were generally acted on only when the mayor perceived an opportunity to incorporate public reactions to garner support for his opposition of a particular policy or area of government. In this instance, there was a clear disjunction between greater levels of transparency and increased public sector responsiveness in the sense that the public sector responded only when it was perceived political capital to be gained. Ahn and Bretschneider (2011), who also examined the relationship between transparency, accountability, and responsiveness of public bureaucracy in a district government in the city of Seoul, found that this relationship was predicated on the perception of a political incentive by elected officials (reelection) to reduce bureaucratic autonomy. While the authors found that enhanced transparency was successful in aligning the actions of the public bureaucracy with the demands placed on it by elected officials and citizens, the implication is that the outcome would have differed considerably had such a political incentive not existed.

The broad reform trend of NPM, which was premised in large on the notion of making government more accountable, also led to widespread adoption of various transparency initiatives (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004). Prior research has suggested that transparency can result in dysfunctional forms of accountability and responsiveness on the part of public bureaucracies. For example, Hood (2007), drawing on research from the field of psychology, has suggested the presence of a negativity bias: “the tendency of negative information to produce more activity and impact than positive information” (p. 192). The implication of this negativity bias is that the effects of transparency are contingent on whether the information being disclosed portrays a public organization in a positive or negative light. In the event that the information is unfavorable, Hood (2010b) has found evidence to suggest that transparency is likely to provoke some form of blame avoidance behavior on the part of public organizations or actors, who try to shift responsibility for a particular shortcoming to another actor. In a similar vein, research by Barberis (1998) on the English Child Support Agency and Prison Service has demonstrated that while the public disclosure of information has facilitated the public's ability to hold public officials more accountable than ever before, this disclosure also serves to constrain public officials in their capacity to respond to public criticisms for fear of “embarrassing their ministers” (p. 459). One way of interpreting this finding is that while transparency is effective in at least partially revealing problems, it may also possess the unintended consequence of complicating the resolution of such problems.

A final important point relates to “one of the corner-stones of political science” and a significant guiding influence behind many of the monitoring initiatives used in the public sector: “‘the more closely we are watched, the better we behave’” (Bentham 2001, p. 277, cited in Hood, 2007, p. 193). Prat (2005) has demonstrated that attempts to enhance the transparency of an agent's actions (e.g., the policy of a particular public organization) can create an incentive for the agent to discount his or her experience and expertise and instead opt to “act according to how an agent is expected to act a priori.” This “conformist behavior” on the part of the agent is problematic for the principal because it creates a situation where the agent sees bigger gains in not getting punished than in performing his or her job well. Norman (2001) has reasoned that “public sectors that fail to provide sufficient managerial freedoms will foster unresponsive, bureaucratic behavior” (p. 69). He examined the influence of NPM reforms in New Zealand based on a sample of forty-one public officials in the country's capital city. This examination revealed that sustained emphasis on “control-oriented systems” of management, which draw heavily on the ideas of enhanced transparency and strict accountability, “run the risk of fostering minimum compliance rather than committed enthusiasm” of public employees (p. 83).

How Transparency Affects Citizens' Perceptions of Their Public Sector

Citizens' perceptions of their public sector have important implications for accountability. The literature in public administration has often contended that citizens' evaluations of public sector performance are misinformed. For example, Mettler (2011) has used the term submerged state to refer to a situation where public programs and services are increasingly administered in collaboration with various private actors (p. 804). In these contexts, citizens are often not aware that such policies and services originate with the government and instead attribute their existence to private actors. As a result, citizens are generally not fully aware of all their government is doing to improve their well-being. Put differently, citizens are not fully aware of how responsive their public sector actually is.

Kelly and Swindell (2002) discussed two common types of errors often committed by citizens in their evaluation of government performance: errors of attribution and errors of assessment. Errors of attribution are defined as when a citizen believes that “government is providing a service that it is not providing, or may believe government is not providing a service when it is” (p. 612). Errors of assessment refer to a situation where citizens attribute the provision of a service to the wrong government actor. Keeping in mind such errors, previous research that has searched for relationships between objective measures of government performance and subjective measures (citizens' satisfaction with public services) has found that many times there is little correlation between the two (Swindell & Kelly, 2000; Kelly & Swindell, 2002). Acknowledging this lack of correlation between citizens' perceptions of public sector performance and actual performance, Kelly (2002) remarked, “If you only knew how well we [government] are performing, you'd [citizens] be highly satisfied with the quality of our service.”

Some empirical research has found support for the argument that enhanced transparency can improve public attitudes toward the public sector. First, with respect to the notion that citizens tend not to know what services their public sector is actually responsible for, Koch and Mettler (2012) examined the results of a survey conducted in the United States and found that the majority of respondents claimed to have never accessed a government service. However, when presented with a list of twenty-one specific services to choose from, nearly all reported using at least one. Accordingly, research by Buell and Norton (2014) provides evidence to suggest the utility of transparency in fostering more positive perceptions of the public by making citizens better aware of just what their government is doing. They found that Boston-area residents who were exposed to information detailing what the government was doing to address various problems—referred to by the piece as operational transparency—demonstrated more positive perceptions of their public sector and were also found to express greater support for the maintenance or expansion of government programs. This can be taken as an instance where transparency served to reveal to citizens just how responsive the public sector was.

Such reasoning regarding the utility of transparency to improve citizen perceptions of government has been extended to trust in government too. In many developed nations, a steady decline in citizens' levels of trust in government has been observed. Some view this trend as indicative of growing sentiment that the public sector is not adequately responding to the needs of citizens (Im et al., 2014). Cook, Jacobs, and Kim (2010) have found evidence to suggest that such mistrust in government “results not from weak government performance but from weak citizen performance in acquiring accurate information and competently processing it” (p. 398). Proponents of enhanced transparency, such as Cook and colleagues, have reasoned that the active disclosure of information by public organizations can offset declining levels of trust in government by improving citizens' understanding of public processes and outcomes and demonstrating to citizens just how responsive the public sector actually is. Yet empirical support for such reasoning has been far from conclusive.

Within the body of empirical research that has found a positive relationship between transparency and trust in government, perhaps the strongest support has been uncovered by Cook and colleagues (2010). They examined how exposure to information regarding a public service (social security policies) influences levels of trust in social security. Their findings suggest that “sending out objective information can boost citizens' knowledge about Social Security programs across individuals with disparate traits and in turn improve their confidence in the program” (p. 409).

Welch and colleagues (2005) provide more subtle evidence of a positive correlation between transparency and trust in government. They found no evidence of a direct relationship between transparency satisfaction and trust in government. However, they did find that transparency satisfaction possessed a weak positive relationship with satisfaction with e-government, and e-government satisfaction was strongly correlated with trust in government. Park and Blenkinsopp (2011) examined the influence of transparency on the relationship between citizen perceptions of government corruption and satisfaction with public services. Not only did their findings suggest that greater transparency directly reduced perceptions of corruption and positively affected levels of satisfaction with public service provision, but that this relationship was partially mediated by levels of trust in government.

An additional vein of literature has refuted a positive influence of transparency on citizen trust in government. This literature has found transparency to have either no significant influence on trust in government or to actually lower levels of trust in government. Experimental research by Grimmelikhuijsen and colleagues (2013) that compared the effects of transparency on trust in government in South Korea and the Netherlands illustrates both perspectives. The authors conducted three experiments using Dutch and South Korean respondents. Among the Dutch respondents, they found that the impact of enhanced transparency on trust in government among respondents was insignificant across two of the three experimental groups, whereas in the third group, respondents who received information regarding an unsuccessful government policy outcome exhibited lower levels of trust in government than the control group, which received no information. South Korean respondents exposed to transparency in all three experimental groups exhibited lower levels of trust in government than those in the control group. The implication of their findings, similar to those of Prat (2005), is that the consequences of transparency will vary according to the type of information that is disclosed, whether it relates to outcomes or processes, or is positive or negative in nature. Moreover, while serving to cast doubt on the utility of transparency as a means of enhancing trust in government, Grimmelikhuijsen and colleagues' findings also point to the influence of culture in determining how citizens will respond to information that government decides to publicly disclose.

Consequences of Transparency for Accountability and Responsiveness

Like any other type of public sector reform, those attempting to improve transparency intend to address a problem that relates to the public sector. Accordingly, transparency reforms may be implemented with the intention of realizing a variety of desired consequences, such as curtailing public sector corruption, improving citizens' perceptions of public sector performance, or introducing greater fiscal stability (Heald, 2003, Welch et al., 2005, Bertot et al., 2010). However, transparency reforms also possess a distinctive feature in that a lack of public sector transparency can in itself constitute a problem (Piotrowski, 2014). Therefore, in addition to serving as a means to a particular performance-related end, greater transparency can also be viewed as an end in itself (Birkinshaw, 2006). This can be problematic in that a reform intending to enhance transparency can always be construed as successful, even if it serves only marginally to enhance transparency while having little bearing on accountability. This was the situation with the case of the award-winning Seoul Metropolitan Government's Dasan Call Center, which was used to provide citizens with any information they requested in an effort to enhance transparency, yet recorded only complaints that tended to align with the mayor's political ambitions, implying an actual reduction in public sector accountability (Im et al., 2013). An additional example is the “Florida Has a Right to Know” legislation that intends to make public the salaries of many state government employees. While such legislation can be seen as increasing transparency, it is unclear exactly how such information serves to contribute to the accountability of any actors in government.

The lack of established objectives for transparency reforms might be seen as typical when it comes to public management reforms, as public organizations are often characterized by considerable degrees of goal ambiguity. An initial step to tie transparency more closely to accountability would be to clearly specify just what form of accountability problem that increased public disclosure of information intends to ameliorate. A key advantage in doing so is that it facilitates the identification of conditions that are necessary for tying greater transparency to the particular accountability problem it intends to address. As an example, research by Lindstedt and Naurin (2010) found that transparency's effectiveness in reducing corruption was more pronounced in contexts where measures were taken to ensure that citizens were able to access the information being disclosed and could act on that information. Subsequently, the authors reason that “transparency in itself is not enough” (p. 23). For transparency reforms to be effective in fostering accountability, they must be accompanied by complementary reforms that ensure the public has access to this information and can impose sanctions when and where they see fit. While some of these complementary reforms will be more universal in nature, such as a free press or the establishment of ombudsmen, others are likely to vary according to administrative context. Presumably the more specific the accountability issue a transparency reform is envisioned to address, the clearer the complementary reforms become.

An additional factor to consider is the nature of the information. Several frameworks have been used to delineate different forms of transparency. These approaches attempt to distinguish between different types of transparency depending on the object (Heald, 2003; Prat, 2005; Fox, 2007). Here, three different objects can be distinguished based on their relationship to a particular public policy (Grimmelikhuijsen, 2012). The first deals with decision-making transparency, which relates to the public disclosure of reasons for deciding on a particular course of action. Policy transparency, the second, refers to the disclosure of information about the policy itself—how it is intended to affect a particular issue and what the implications will be for different segments of society. The third object of transparency, policy outcomes, refers to the public disclosure of information that details the extent to which a policy achieved the objectives it was intended to.

The implications of transparency for accountability will likely differ according to the object the information relates to. For example, information that pertains to policy outcomes will have different implications for accountability when compared to information pertaining to decision making, as addressing issues related to decision making will likely require a different course of action than attempts to address issues that relate to policy outcomes. Therefore, from this perspective, effective practice stems from an understanding of the consequences that result from the disclosure of different types of public information. Literature examining the effects of different types of transparency has mainly focused on understanding their relation to citizens' attitudes toward their government (Grimmelikhuijsen, 2012; De Fine Licht, 2014). For example, Grimmelikhuijsen and colleagues (2013) found that citizens in both South Korea and the Netherlands responded more strongly to information related to policy outcomes than to decision-making or policy transparency. These findings, by extension, may be taken to suggest that demands to hold the public sector accountable vary according to the type of information the public is exposed to. Additional research by De Fine Licht (2014) has demonstrated how the policy area that transparency relates to can serve to moderate relationships between transparency and outcomes of interest, such as perceptions of legitimacy. One of the conclusions she draws from her findings, and in line with the reasoning above, is that public officials “have to consider the decision making context when analyzing the consequences of increased decision making transparency.”

Transparency's Impact on Accountability across Different Areas of Public Policy

Much of the literature on transparency tends to assume that the effects of transparency will tend to be homogeneous regardless of the policy area such information relates to: transparency is implicitly assumed to be just as effective in addressing issues with accountability for environmental policy as it is in addressing those related to health care policy. Yet a variety of factors are likely to influence how transparency influences the effects of transparency on accountability across different policy areas, such as issue salience or the timing with which information is publicly disclosed. For example, transparency may result in greater accountability in policy areas that citizens perceive as being highly important, whereas in policy areas that citizens perceive as being less important, a much weaker relationship between transparency and accountability is present. The implication of this point is that the effectiveness of transparency in fostering accountability is likely to vary according to policy sector. To this end, it is important for research to gain greater insight into which policy areas this tool is most appropriate for.

A subsequent factor for consideration is whether increasing the accountability of some areas of public policy through enhanced transparency is desirable. Many aspects of public policy are highly technical, meaning that descriptions of the policy, the decision process leading up to it policy, and its outcomes may not be easily understood by the general public. In this case, a strong link between transparency and accountability may be undesirable because citizens' ability to make effective use of the information afforded to them is likely to be limited due to various cognitive and educational constraints (Cook et al., 2010). As a result, a close association between transparency and accountability may actually result in a divergence between the actions of the public sector and citizens' best interests.

Consequences of Transparency for Different Segments of Society

Citizens' capacity to act on information they are afforded by transparency policy is likely to vary according different features. Cook et al. (2010) found three factors to be of importance in this regard: motivation, cognitive capacity, and social location. Motivation refers to an individual's willingness to obtain information regarding a particular policy. Accordingly, families with children may be more motivated to obtain information about public schools than a family with no children. Cognitive capacity speaks to an individual's ability to understand the information he or she is given. The authors reason that individuals with “a longer formal education” in general will be better able to understand the information that transparency policies provide them. Social location refers to an individual's ability to acquire information about a particular policy. For example, individuals of certain ethnicities or falling into certain income brackets are likely to have easier access to information about certain policies than others.

Taken together, these factors suggest that government might find itself more accountable to some segments of the population and less accountable to others. Offering some support for this line of reasoning is Fountain (2001), who has argued that attempts to empower citizens to, through the use of various private sector practices, exert greater influence over the outputs produced by their government is flawed in that they will likely contribute to greater inequality of service provision. Indeed, not all citizens are capable of making effective use of information that is made public, whereas others may not see any immediate need to obtain information on a particular public policy. While transparency may present the public with the same set of information, the ability to make use of this information to influence government will likely vary over different segments of the population. As a consequence, it is also possible to see transparency as possessing the potential to empower small segments of the population (e.g., interest groups) to manipulate public policy where they see benefits in doing so.