Using Transparency to Enhance Responsiveness and Trust in Local Government

Abstract

Increasingly, local governments view transparency as a means of (re)connecting with a citizenry that, by many accounts, has grown distant. By improving the public’s access to government information, the expectation is that seeds for more responsive and trustworthy local government will be sown. Yet, empirical assessments of the relationship between transparency, responsiveness, and trust in local government have been mixed. Therefore, the intention of this article is to provide an overview of prior research that attempts to conceptually, and empirically, tie transparency to greater responsiveness and trust in local government. Based upon this review of the literature, implications for effective practice are discussed.

Keywords

transparency local government trust in government responsiveness

Transparency has long been considered a cornerstone of good governance (Hood 2010). It can improve decision making (Bok 1989), impede corruption (Bertot, Jaeger, and Grimes 2010), enhance accountability (Pina, Torres, and Royo 2007), and foster a more informed and understanding citizenry (Cook, Jacobs, and Kim 2010). When taken together, the varied benefits of enhanced transparency should culminate in more responsive and trustworthy public organizations (Goetz and Jenkins 2001; Welch, Hinnant, and Moon 2005; Kim and Lee 2012). Therefore, recent attempts by local governments to enhance transparency have generally been welcomed.

Yet, many are now challenging this long-standing understanding of the effects that accompany enhanced transparency. Some caution that enhanced transparency can overload citizens with information, triggering confusion and reductions to functional accountability (O’Neill 2002; Porumbescu and Im 2015). Others find that greater exposure to information pertaining to the inner workings of government can actually reduce citizens’ perceptions of public sector legitimacy and trustworthiness (S. Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2013; De Fine Licht 2014). With respect to performance management, enhanced transparency, when complemented by attempts to bolster performance evaluation, has been found to actually detract from performance by incentivizing “minimum compliance rather than committed enthusiasm” of public employees (Norman 2001, 83; Prat 2005). While this developing stream of research does not necessarily argue against greater transparency, it does highlight the need to better understand implications of attempts to increase transparency.

Due to citizens’ close proximity to local governments, as well as a rapid increase in attempts to enhance transparency at this level, this area of government is a particularly interesting context to assess the effects of attempts to enhance transparency. Accordingly, a large number of studies have attempted to offer insight into how public disclosure influences the way local governments function. While valuable, the breadth of findings makes distilling key themes and implications for effective practice challenging.

This article synthesizes the various perspectives on transparency and also provides an overview of the implications of local governments’ attempts to enhance transparency. To this end, two broad questions guide this article:

How can transparency be used to promote more responsive performance by local governments? and

How can transparency be used to promote greater citizen trust in local government?

Emphasis is placed upon responsiveness and trust in government in particular, as these are often outcomes of primary interest for reforms intending to enhance transparency (S. G. Grimmelikhuijsen 2012).

This review proceeds as follows. First, an overview is provided of research that discusses what transparency is and the different ways transparency can promote more responsive and trustworthy local government. Following this, the role of transparency as a tool in promoting more responsive and trustworthy local government is reevaluated and implications for more effective use of transparency, as a tool for establishing more responsive and trustworthy local government, are discussed.

Defining Transparency: What Does It Entail?

Transparency refers to the extent external stakeholders are afforded regular access to information about the way their public organizations operate (Meijer 2013). Through disclosure of government information, a key objective of enhanced transparency is to improve the public’s understanding of what their government is doing and why. As will be explained, this improved understanding of government is thought to engender greater trust in government and more responsive public organizations (S. Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2013; Porumbescu and Im 2015).

In order to enable the public to accurately understand what their government is doing, information that is publicly disclosed must be comprehensive in the sense that it touches upon the issues necessary to understand the actions taken by the government. There are several frameworks that have been developed to provide a more systematic understanding of the types of information necessary to enhance “government transparency.” Two examples of such frameworks are outlined below.

The first framework divides local government transparency into four dimensions (Cucciniello and Nasi 2014). The first institutional dimension focuses upon disclosure of information pertaining to the activities of public organizations. The second political dimension refers to information pertaining to political representatives, such as their salary or their attendance in town hall meetings. The third dimension relates to financial management and outlines how public actors make use of the financial resources they are allocated. The fourth dimension of transparency, service delivery, outlines how local government performs in its delivery of public services. Accordingly, disclosure of information pertaining to each of these dimensions is critical to affording citizens a comprehensive understanding of how each component of their local government functions.

The second framework divides transparency of local government in general into three sequential components (Heald 2003; S. G. Grimmelikhuijsen 2012). The first component, decision-making transparency, refers to citizens’ access to information about discussions leading up to the adoption of a particular policy—who were the actors involved in the process and what points were considered in the decision to adopt a particular course of action? The second dimension, policy transparency, outlines how an adopted policy intends to address a particular social issue as well as anticipated effects on different segments of the population. The third and final dimension is policy outcome transparency, which addresses the provision of information to the public that details the actual effects of a particular policy. Taken together, these three dimensions, like those proposed by Cucciniello and Nasi, are intended to provide the public a comprehensive understanding of what the government is doing, how the government is doing it, and why.

As both frameworks illustrate, enhancing transparency of local government means much more than the mere provision of “more information to more people” (Welch, Hinnant, and Moon 2005, 375). Rather, the information needed to enhance local government transparency is diverse. In large part, this is due to the broad spectrum of obligations local governments are responsible for. As such, without access to such comprehensive information, the public will be unable to accurately understand and evaluate the actions of their government. For example, exposure to information on policy outcomes (policy outcome transparency) may help the public obtain a better understanding of the effects of a particular policy. Yet, without exposure to information that discusses the intended effects of said policy (policy transparency), it is impossible for the public to accurately gauge performance.

In the sections that follow, two claims that frequently accompany decisions to enhance transparency are assessed. The first claim is that enhanced transparency promotes greater responsiveness of local governments, whereas the second claim is that enhanced transparency engenders greater trust in local government. While transparency is thought to result in an assortment of benefits to local government, this review focuses upon responsiveness and trust in government in particular as these claims tend to be among the widely most discussed in the local government literature.

Claim 1: Transparency Promotes More Responsive Local Government

Accountability plays an important role in linking transparency to more responsive local government. By affording greater public access to government information, external stakeholders are empowered to align the performance of their local government more closely with their own preferences. Therefore, from this perspective, a central objective of transparency policy is mainly one of empowerment. Moreover, as discussed earlier, achieving this objective is contingent upon the disclosure of various forms of government information.

For enhanced transparency to actually empower citizens, it must be both accessed by and intelligible to the general public. Prior research, however, finds this to be a challenge. For example, Cook, Jacobs, and Kim (2010) reason that motivation among citizens to obtain government information will vary according to the subject area—retirees are more likely to be more motivated to obtain information about changes to social security than recent college graduates. Etzioni (2010) argues that not all citizens possess the same cognitive capacity—some will be able to make more effective use of the information transparency affords them than others. Taken together, two key challenges can be identified when attempting to link greater transparency to greater responsiveness in local government. The first challenge is to effectively disseminate the types of information necessary to empower the public, whereas the second challenge is to ensure that access to such information empowers all segments of the population equally.

Empirical assessments of the utility of transparency in promoting more responsive local government also bring to light some additional challenges in linking greater transparency to a more responsive local government. To highlight these challenges, three examples are discussed. Each example was chosen for the reason it extends the discussion in the preceding paragraph by providing more applied perspectives on the relationship between transparency, accountability, and responsiveness.

First, a recent study by Im, Porumbescu, and Lee (2013) examined the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s widely used nonemergency call center (Dasan Call Center), which was tasked with enhancing the transparency, accountability, and responsiveness of the Seoul Metropolitan Government. Their analysis indicated that, while the Dasan Call Center improved citizens’ access to information about the Seoul Metropolitan Government, critical responses to this information on the part of citizens were often addressed selectively. Specifically, the mayor, whose purview the operation fell under, would typically only respond to citizens’ attempts to hold their government accountable when he thought doing so would give him a leg up on a political rival. In this sense, while overall government transparency was increased by the Dasan Call Center, the links to accountability and responsiveness were only present when the Mayor deemed them politically expedient.

A second study, by Pina, Torres, and Royo (2007), examines how local governments in fifteen European Union member states made use of e-government websites to enhance levels of transparency, accountability, and responsiveness to citizens. In general, their findings are similar to those in Seoul—local governments, across the fifteen nations, tended to make active use of websites to afford citizens access to government information. Yet, while citizens’ access to information increased, the websites typically had little bearing upon accountability in these local governments, as the websites typically lacked an interactive component. Another notable finding here is that governments were selective in their disclosure of information in that they tended to be willing to enhance transparency related to some areas, while avoiding greater transparency in others. For example, governments may be more forthcoming with information about public services but provide less information on the political dimension.

A third example examines the nexus of transparency, accountability, and responsiveness through a lens of influenza pandemic planning by local governments across the United States (French 2011). As the author explains, from an administrative perspective, meaningful pandemic planning requires a dynamic exchange of information between various segments of the population and the local government responsible for their safety. Yet, of the fifty cities surveyed, only twenty-eight had “a pandemic influenza plan that is available for public review, either online or by request” (p. 261). In fact, as French finds, influenza planning in most municipalities appears to constitute a very closed activity. As such, despite the clear benefits of enhanced transparency and responsiveness in this particular policy domain, there is a marked tendency among many municipal governments in the United States to eschew greater transparency and limit opportunities for public input.

When taken together, what these examples illustrate is that transparency, on its own, is insufficient for stimulating greater administrative accountability and responsiveness in local government. Rather, attempts to enhance transparency must be complemented by the establishment formal channels through which the public can consistently act upon the information they are afforded. Yet, in practice, such opportunities are seldom provided. As a final point, while the examples discussed here address the relationship between transparency and responsiveness at a single level of government, and within specific administrative contexts, further evidence suggests that the trends identified here are pervasive in that they are found across different national contexts and levels of government (Wong and Welch 2004; Fox 2007; Piotrowski et al. 2009; Eom 2014).

Claim 2: Transparency Promotes Trust in Local Government

In addition to enhancing responsiveness, transparency is argued to promote public trust in government. This is because transparency can be used to correct misperceptions of government performance that result from a lack of information. Specifically, citizens often lack objective information about what their government does for them, or how well their government is performing, and as a result are overly critical of the performance of their local government (Kelly 2002; Mettler 2011; Im, Porumbescu, and Lee 2013).

Kelly and Swindell (2002) outline two forms of errors citizens make when evaluating local government that occur when citizens lack information about their government. The first is an error in attribution that occurs when citizens are not aware of who is responsible for the delivery of a particular public service (p. 612). For example, citizens may believe that a private or nonprofit organization is responsible for the operation of a local public health clinic. The second is an error in assessment, where citizens’ evaluations of a service contradict data afforded by objective performance indicators. For example, citizens may perceive water provided by a local water sanitation facility as less potable than bottled water provided by a private manufacturer, despite scientific evidence to the contrary.

Errors in attribution and errors in assessment, and the absence of information that causes them, can lead to a situation where the public perceives government as not doing enough to promote citizens’ well-being. Some argue that enhancing transparency can reduce errors of attribution and assessment by exposing the public to information that clarifies how local government is contributing to the public’s well-being, and to what effect (Buell and Norton 2013). By allowing citizens to understand more clearly how the actions of local government are contributing to the public’s well-being, transparency is reasoned to promote greater trust in government.

Yet, despite claims that greater transparency can enhance levels of trust in government, evidence suggests the relationship between these two constructs is far more complex. To illustrate some of the contours of this relationship between transparency and trust in local government in an applied context, an overview of findings from prior literature drawn from distinct administrative contexts is provided.

Worthy (2013) has examined the relationship between transparency and trust in local government in the United Kingdom. In his analysis, an interesting dynamic to the relationship between transparency and trust in local government is uncovered, in that the medium through which citizens access government information appears to bear heavily upon their decision to trust government. As Worthy explains, in many instances, citizens’ exposure to government information came through their use of mass media outlets, which often obtain information from local governments via freedom of information requests. The author observed that the effects of this mediated form of transparency would typically vary according to whether the coverage portrayed government in a positive or negative light. As such, in this instance, no consistent link was uncovered leading Worthy to conclude that transparency possessed “no general impact on trust” (p. 406).

In contrast to Worthy’s findings, research by Tolbert and Mossberger (2006) offers a different perspective on the relationship between transparency and citizens’ trust in local governments in the United States. Specifically, this article did not offer direct evidence of a positive relationship between transparency and trust in local government. However, the authors did find evidence of a strong relationship between citizens’ use of e-government, their perceptions of local government responsiveness, and their levels of trust in the local government. These findings are interpreted to suggest that the information afforded to citizens via local government’s websites may clarify the role their government plays in responding to public needs and improving the quality of life, which in turn bolsters levels of trust in local government (p. 366). To this end, the results of this study can be interpreted to offer a degree of support for those arguing that transparency’s primary contribution to trust in government stems from its ability to demonstrate the various ways the public sector is contributing to the public’s well-being.

As a final example, research by S. Grimmelikhuijsen et al. (2013) sought to examine whether national culture had any bearing on the relationship between transparency and trust in government. Through the use of a series of experiments, the authors assessed how decision making, policy, and policy outcome transparency related to citizens’ perceptions of public sector trustworthiness in South Korean central government and Dutch local governments. They found that the relationship between the different forms of transparency and citizens’ perceptions of public sector trustworthiness, in both contexts, generally lacked a positive relationship to perceptions of trustworthiness. Moreover, when policy outcome transparency conveyed information pertaining to policy outcomes that were negative (a policy fell short of achieving its stated objectives), a slight negative effect upon trust in government was uncovered, with the magnitude of the effect slightly higher in South Korea. From these findings, the authors conclude that in general, transparency lacks an impact upon trust in the government, unless the information disseminated is negative, in which case trust in the government may be negatively impacted.

These three studies were selected in order to illustrate different shapes the relationship between transparency and trust in government can take in an applied setting. A common theme found in each of these studies is that transparency lacks a consistent relationship to trust in government—in some instances, transparency can reduce levels of trust in government, but seldom does transparency, on its own, result in greater trust in government.

Implications for Practice: The Evolving Ethos of Local Government Transparency?

Hood (2007, 192), who has written extensively on the topic of public sector transparency, observes that “mostly, transparency is one of those banal ideas … that are taken as unexceptionable in discussions of governance and public management.” To this end, even if attempts to enhance transparency fall short of achieving objectives such as improving the responsiveness of, or enhancing public trust in local government, they can still be construed as successful, as long it can be demonstrated that public access to some form of government information expanded. In this way, transparency in local government has traditionally been viewed as more of an administrative value that undergirds good governance, than a public service in itself (cf. Piotrowski 2014). However, with developments in information and communication technology and, consequently, the increased ease with which local governments can now publicly disclose information, current discourse suggests that the way we conceive of transparency has evolved subtly, yet conspicuously, over the course of the past decades to embody characteristics and concerns typically attributed to public services.

What has become apparent in the course of this article is that local governments are beginning to pay more attention to issues related to the implementation of and outcomes associated with transparency. In this respect, discourse on local government transparency is now shifting toward concerns related to effective practice with regard to information provision (Asgarkhani 2005; Bertot, Jaeger, and Grimes 2010; Porumbescu and Im 2015; Cucciniello et al. 2014). As such, based upon the literature previously discussed, two implications for effective practice are outlined.

First, as the way transparency is conceived of increasingly incorporates aspects of a public service, greater attention will have to be paid to considerations that relate to the supply and demand for government information—is the government supplying citizens with the types of information they demand? As discussed earlier, the general concept of local government transparency incorporates a host of distinct forms of information pertaining to actions taken by local government. However, the types of information publicly disclosed by local governments, often in accordance with various legal obligations, do not necessarily lead to increased availability of government information that the public views as relevant (Cucciniello et al. 2014). Rather, merely adhering to legal obligations for disclosure is, in itself, unlikely to be sufficient for obtaining goals of engendering greater responsiveness and trust in local government. As such, efforts to enhance public disclosure must be supplemented by attempts to ensure that the transparency policies of local governments disclose the types of information that the public deems relevant, so as to improve the chances of the general public accessing and using the information afforded to them. It is only by ensuring the general public accesses government information that we can then hope to see greater responsiveness and trust in local government.

Second, as discussed earlier, there is a tendency for transparency to fall short of enhancing accountability and trust in government. What this suggests is that, because the information being supplied by government is perceived as lacking immediate relevance to the general public it is underused and, therefore, fails to fulfill objectives of enhancing trust in government and local government responsiveness. To some, the lack of consistent empirical evidence has led to doubts over the utility of transparency in achieving such objectives. To others, these findings indicate that in order to achieve goals of enhanced responsiveness and trust, governments must pay closer attention to the source(s) responsible for delivering the information. Indeed, citizens tend to doubt information that is delivered directly by a public organization, yet find the same information more credible when disseminated via an independent organization (James and Van Ryzin 2015). As such, transparency may fall short of stimulating greater trust or responsiveness because of the way the information is being delivered.

Building upon this point, in an analysis of case studies, van Zyl (2014) finds that the ability of transparency to fulfill its objectives stems from the relationships a government agency cultivates with different civil society organizations in the community it serves. This is largely because of civil society organization’s ability to operate as an intermediary that effectively communicates the relevance of government information to different segments of the community. Taken together, a key implication for practice to be drawn is that effective, efficient, and equitable delivery of government information necessitates the careful cultivation of a network of third party actors (e.g., universities or nonprofits), who are viewed as credible by both citizens and local government. Through establishing such a network of credible intermediaries to disseminate government information, it is possible for local governments to capitalize upon the ability of these organizations to effectively communicate the relevance of information pertaining to their local government to different segments of the community, while at the same time creating the potential for citizens to evaluate information more objectively.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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