Contrasting perceptions about transparency,citizen participation,and open government between civil society organization and government

Abstract

The concepts of Transparency, Citizen Participation and Open Government is increasingly being used by politicians, public officials and civil society. Open Government strategies are being assumed by public administration at different levels of government, but also by civil society organizations that are involved in issues of transparency, citizen participation mainly. However, there is a diversity about how the concepts are used by different social sectors. In this sense, it is pertinent to know how these concepts are perceived among the main sectors that trigger policies of transparency, citizen participation and open government. The objective of this research is to analyze transparency, citizen participation and open government from the perspectives of two fundamental sectors in the political-social participation process: Civil Society Organizations (CSO) and Government. To contrast the perspectives of the two sectors, the case of the State of Jalisco, Mexico is studied. This research shows the results of a survey administrated to members of CSO and public officials involved in open government actions. In order to contrast ideas and assessments, three dimensions are established for its analysis: a) open government, c) transparency and b) citizen participation. The results show a considerable gap between the perceptions of public officials and organized civil society.

Keywords

Open government transparency citizen participation civil society jalisco perception survey

1. Introduction

Open government is a concept associated with a new model of openness in public management founded in the pillars of transparency and citizen participation (Meijer et al., 2012). This new public management model named open government is considered a governance strategy that is progressively being adopted by public administrations at different levels of government (Gascó-Hernández, 2014; Jaeger & Bertot, 2010; Lee & Kwak, 2012; Meijer et al., 2012; Criado & Ruvalcaba-Gomez, 2018). The adoption of open government has been invigorated by political and institutional support in different contexts, particularly by the issuing of the “Memorandum for Transparency and Open Government” under the Obama administration in 2009 (McDermott, 2010). Thereafter, open government has been incorporated as a high-level political priority around three principles: transparency, participation and collaboration (Abu-Shanab, 2015; Lathrop & Ruma, 2010; Weaver, 2017).

As a consequence of the wide adoption of open government policies, politicians, public managers, and managers from civil society are becoming more engaged in the incorporation of the principles of transparency and citizen participation within the overarching open government movement (Criado & Ruvalcaba-Gomez, 2018). Nevertheless, the role of transparency and citizen participation in open government remains unclear. Arguably, there are different understandings about how and to what extent transparency and citizen participation contribute to open government. Social activists and public managers, for example, have different goals and are taking different actions to promote transparency and citizen participation within open government policies (Reddick, 2011).

This study seeks to take a step forward in that direction by comparing the perceptions of transparency, citizen participation and open government among two of the most relevant sectors in the process of interaction and impact on decision-making: Government and Civil Society Organizations (CSO). To do so, the research question is: How do civil society organizations and government perceive transparency, citizen participation and open government in the State of Jalisco?

To address the research question, the research design is a case study, using data collected from an online survey administered to public officials from the government of Jalisco State and managers of CSO, both in Mexico. Jalisco is one of the 32 States composing the Mexican Federation, has a population of 7 million inhabitants and is composed of 125 municipalities. As a Federated State, Jalisco is divided into three powers (executive, legislative and judicial) and several autonomous institutions. The case studied departs from the creation of the the Technical Secretariat for Open Government of Jalisco (TSOGJ) in October 2015. The TSOGJ was created with the intention of bringing together members of the Government and the Civil Society Organized to promote open government actions.

The relevance of this descriptive analysis is opening up a research stream about two pillars of open government – transparency and citizen participation – by bringing empirical evidence in studies on democratic quality and new policies in sub-national governments. Further, this study emphasizes the need for stronger conceptualizations about transparency and citizen participation as they are not clearly defined and understood concepts (Criado et al., 2018). As a consequence, the implementation of open government policies tends to be very diverse in practice. It is particularly important to study open government policies at the sub-national levels, since these governments have the strongest connection with citizens’ everyday life. However, the literature and particularly the empirical evidence at this level are limited.

This article is composed by six section, including the foregoing introduction. The second section reviews and discusses the literature about transparency and citizen participation in the context of open government. The third section presents the methodology of the empirical analysis, as well as the operationalization of the concepts. The fourth section presents the findings, comparing the perceptions about open government, transparency and citizen participation between Jaliscto State government officers and CSO managers. The fifth section is discussion and implications of the findings. The sixth and final section presents the conclusions of the study and lays venues for future research.

2. Literature review

As described in the introduction, open government is a concept founded in the pillars of transparency and citizen participation (Meijer et al., 2012). Therefore, the literature review addresses the overarching concept of open government by reviewing the literature on transparency, citizen participation, and collaboration; their definitions, main challenges as components of open government policies and their association with the open government movement.

The first pillar of open government is transparency. The concept of transparency converges with the idea of opening the government. Some definitions of transparency emphasize transparency as a fundamental principle of facilitating access to public scrutiny and therefore conceive transparency as a concept that begins with the openness of public affairs (Villeneuve, 2014). In this sense, some authors maintain that, to make this transparency active, the basic policy instruments are access to information and regulatory laws (Jaeger & Bertot, 2010). However, transparency is a concept with multiple nuances as it is also associated with the issues of access to information, accountability, and data openness (Ruvalcaba-Gomez, 2017).

Transparency is also associated with the rights and obligations of public administrations and citizens. In this sense, Park and Blenkinsopp (2011) point out that transparent information defines the conditions in which citizens have access to the data and documents of the actions and the public officers’ decision-making processes.

The emergence of a new generation of information technologies has bolstered the increase of public transparency policies – in both quantity and diversity, as these have become fundamental to support e-government processes and open government initiatives (McDermott, 2010). Therefore, in recent years, the dissemination of public information has increased; it has even created a formal or informal norm in the public sector, where often the availability of public information is no longer an option, but a social requirement (Bertot et al., 2014; Criado et al., 2013). Further, transparency has become an important source of government’s legitimacy, specially at the local levels; through transparency policies citizens recover trust in government, and subsequently government legitimacy may be reinforced (Sandoval, 2011; Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2013).

There is difference between information that contributes to effective transparency and a simple disclosure of information (Park & Blenkinsopp, 2011). Further, according to Fung, Graham and Weil (2004), focused transparency implies that the information provided through transparency policies should be conceived within particular contexts and through laws and policies that outline types of disclosure.

The debate on transparency within the open government has been conveyed as part of a new model of government where public managers have a stronger involvement with information and transparency policies (Porumbescu et al., 2017). Under this new way of governing, the publication of information is not only desirable, but essential to enable effective a participatory and collaborative interaction with citizens. In other words, under the concept of open government, transparency and citizen participation are interdependent concepts. Transparency is a precondition for activating citizen participation to the extent that it provides quality and relevant information and data (Lee & Kwak, 2012). Transparency is a dynamic element that promotes citizen participation, institutional strengthening, accountability, as well as trust in government.

The second pillar of open government, citizen participation, encompasses the involvement of citizens, as well as organizations from the private sector and civil society in the sphere of political-institutional power, with the aim of consulting, managing and providing feedback on public action (Nabatchi & Amsler, 2014; Pitti, 2018; Ekman & Amnå, 2012). The term participation has a colloquial connotation of taking part in something. In the public sphere, this represents the partial involvement of one or more individuals or groups in a collective action. Citizen participation, on the other hand, is also understood as the action of sharing something with someone or at least letting others know something (Merino, 1995). Participation, therefore, can be understood as a social activity of political connotation that implies some a collectively organized action among sectors or individuals (Ekman & Amnå, 2012).

Overall, there are three types of participation: political participation, citizen participation, and civic participation (or voluntary association). Political participation is the direct participation of citizens through institutional democratic mechanisms (e.g., voting) or contacting elected officials (Ekman & Amnå, 2012; Pitti, 2018), as well as actions through non-institutional mechanisms (e.g., petitioning and protesting). Citizen participation is the participation of individuals in any part of an administrative process of government, or in the interaction between citizens and public officers on policy issues or services delivery (Callahan, 2007). Finally, civic association refers to the voluntary association of individuals to support their community regardless of the intervention or not of government (Smith, 1994).

Rising expectations and declining trust in government are some of the contemporary challenges of democratic systems (Fung, 2015; Pollitt, 2016). In several consolidated democracies, citizen’s trust in government has been falling (Dalton & Shin, 2014; Norris, 1999). This is because younger generations are increasingly skeptical or dissatisfied about democratic institutions (Klingemann, 2014) and political parties (Van Biezen et al., 2012). And this emergent generation of assertive citizens seeks to make changes by participating more actively in society (Hooghe et al., 2017). Thus, citizens are increasingly assuming that deliberative democracy is a tool that helps re-shaping the democracy by allowing citizens to better express their individual or collective will (Fung, 2015).

Some scholars suggest that citizen participation can become a thread to the status quo. For example, Villoria and Ramírez-Alujas (2013) argue that the increase of citizens’ empowerment can reduce the power of the political elite. Specially in liberal democracies with global economies, it is very difficult to expand participation beyond the limits where the democratic stability could be jeopardized (Villoria, 2013).

Enabling effective citizen participation is one of the contemporary challenges in the public administration; to address these challenges, governments need innovative means to re-shape the interactions and working relationships between citizens and governments. An effective citizen participation must create channels of interaction where citizens can comfortably express their voice, and governments could better understand how to encourage and support citizen participation (Fung, 2015; Bingham et al., 2005).

Although the concept of open government rests on three pillars – transparency, citizen participation, and collaboration, most of the studies about open government have focused primarily in the pillars of transparency and citizen participation (Criado et al., 2018). The third pillar, collaboration, is associatied with the concepts of interoperability, co-production and social innovation, as well as with the design, provision and evaluation of public services generating public value (Gascó-Hernández, 2014). Collaboration, according to Lee and Kwak (2012) lies at the highest level within the open government maturity model; this is because collaboration requires interaction between government agencies and civil society. Another perspective conceptualizes collaboration as an element difficult to dissociate from citizen participation, and therefore consider these two pillars as a unified element (Meijer et al., 2012). Under this perspective, open government is established as a dualism of vision (i.e. transparency) and voice (i.e. citizen participation), being the later coupled with collaboration (Meijer et al., 2012).

The implementation of open government has been subject to study in recent years. For example, Wirtz et al. (2015) explored, through a factor analysis, the challenges to successfully implement open government. The obstacles identified by these authors were: legal barriers, hierarchical organizational structure of authorities, bureaucratic decision-making culture, and organizational transparency. In this sense, citizen participation is related to the bureaucratic decision-making culture because the new mechanisms of democratization of citizen participation can transform the decision-making processes in governments.

Emerging technologies have the potential to foster democratic innovations that could address some of these challenges. Today, Internet has become an overarching platform for everyday interaction. When public management uses digital tools, initiatives to implement digital participation arise. This has triggered new social and technical paradigms that have shaped our ways of interaction (Castells, 1996; Castells et al., 2005). Information technologies have provided new mechanisms of citizen participation, which are studied under the field of electronic participation, digital participation, participation 2.0 or e-participation (Bimber et al., 2005; Castells, 2015; Bennett et al., 2011; Johnston, 2015).

The field of e-participation is increasingly gaining attention from scholars worldwide (Åström et al., 2012; Bonsón et al., 2015; Medaglia, 2012; Jho & Song, 2015; Williams et al., 2013; Criado et al., 2013; Ruvalcaba-Gomez, 2019; Sæbø et al., 2008; Sandoval, 2011; Susha & Grönlund, 2012; Conradie & Choenni, 2014). In particular, e-participation is being incorporated in the public sector as a practice to legitimize decisions that provide new ways of linking citizens with governments (Macintosh, 2004; Kim & Lee, 2012).

Most of the innovations on citizen participation in the last decade have been enabled through e-participation (e.g., crowdsourcing, electronic voting, customer relationship management systems, etc.); this has being increasingly adopted by governments and civil society organizations to create spaces for dialogue (Johnston, 2015; Liu, 2017; Herrera, 2012). For this reason, e-participation has being consolidated as one of the central pillars of the open government initiatives. Nowadays, governments often promote the right of citizens to regularly participate along the processes of policy-making, as well as providing information (e.g. individual experiences, suggestions or needs) to public managers.

Open government has adopted transparency and citizen participation as fundamental pillars in its configuration; these elements that link public administrations with citizens and different social sectors. According to several scholars, open government is a research field still in development, and therefore our understanding of many aspects of it is still limited (Lee & Kwak, 2012; Ruvalcaba-Gomez, 2017; Ruvalcaba-Gomez et al., 2018). However, some studies have included a conceptualization considering three pillars of the open government; transparency, participation and collaboration (Criado & Ruvalcaba-Gomez, 2018; Gascó-Hernández, 2014; Lathrop & Ruma, 2010; Lee & Kwak, 2012; Meijer et al., 2012; Petrusic et al., 2016). After the release of the “Memorandum for Transparency and Open Government” in 2009, the three pillars have been the reference concepts of several studies within the open government (Abu-Shanab, 2015; Gascó, 2015; Ganapati & Reddick, 2014; Reddick, 2011; Petrusic et al., 2016; Ruvalcaba-Gomez & Renteria, 2019).

The perceived contribution that any of the three pillars described above can produce to the overarching open government concept may also vary, depending on the point of view. Literature in public opinion has a long tradition studying differences in perceptions among groups of individual and sectors. Regarding this study, there may be a difference in perceptions between public officers and citizens. According to the literature in public opinion, a source of constant conflict for governments to weigh measures to gain public support, in this case, to participate in policy development (Noelle-Neumann, 1991). Citizens also experience a continuous conflict between their individual inclinations and the social demands to conform. In this sense, the perceptions and consequences of public opinion have a direct relationship with democracy and the system of government.

For example, Broockman and Skovron (2018) argue that politicians can maintain systematic misperceptions of citizens’ opinions, this bias can contribute to political representation failures. Often these divergences in perception between politicians and citizens mitigate the opportunities for establishing mechanisms of participation, despite the fact that policy processes that recognize the knowledge of the publics can lead to innovation and a stronger connection in the social structure (Dietrich & Schibeci, 2003). Although its relevance, there is limited empirical research testing the differences among groups of individuals or sectors about the perception of government action.

3. Methodology

3.1 Survey design

The survey was designed based on the operationalization of the key concepts being studied from the systematic literature review of Ruvalcaba-Gomez et al. (2018). The operationalization of the concepts is further supported by other studies (Reddick, 2008; Stephen et al., 2003), although further studies are needed to validate this operationalization.

3.2 Sample

The overall study group consists of government officials and members of civil society organizations who participated directly in the creation and coordination of the Technical Secretariat for Open Government of Jalisco (TSOGJ), in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. Participating in this study were 74 managers from state government offices, and 51 managers from CSO organizations (including profit, non-profit, and academic organizations). The stakeholders considered in this analysis as an OSC, are individuals that are part of these organizations, which promote citizen agendas and represent demands of society. These organizations are not part of the government; they are the main critical voice in the state of Jalisco. Public managers were primarily departmental directors or directors that were the organizational link with the TSOGJ’s coordination office. There was not sampling as all the organizations that joined the TSOGJ action plan were reached out.

3.3 Procedures

The survey was instrumented through Google Forms, and the targeted respondents were scouted the Technical Secretariat for Open Government of Jalisco. The data collection leveraged the Open Government Partnership’s evaluation of Jalisco’s commitments during 2017. A personalized link with an online survey was sent to each manager from the initial sample by representatives of the TSOGJ, along with a memo describing the purposes of the research. The invitation was sent by e-mail with three reminder e-mails sent at one week interval. The managers were required to individually respond the survey on behalf of the organization’s stand on diverse features of the open government initiative. The survey was administered between October 3th, and November 1st, 2017.

3.4 Measurement

The measurements used are composed by three broad dimensions: a) Open Government, b) Transparency, and c) Citizen Participation. The dimension Open Government was operationalized into two categories: 1) level of development of open government values; and 2) level of success of open government. The dimension Transparency was operationalized as level of success of transparency. The dimension Citizen Participation was operationalized as level of success of participation.

The Table 1 presents these measurements. The level of development of open government values was evaluated with the question “In the following topics: What level of development do you think the Government of Jalisco is,” which had four variations: 1) access to information, 2) citizen participation, 3) accountability, and 4) use of new technologies and innovation. The response scale ranged from 1, not developed at all, to 7, totally developed.

Table 1
Description of open government, transparency and citizen participation measurements

Dimension	Question	Variables
Open government	In the following topics: What level of development do you think the Government of Jalisco has?	Access to information, Citizen participation, Accountability, Use of new technologies and innovation.
	What is your personal perception of the success of the implementation of Open Government actions in Jalisco?	Level of success
Transparency	What is your personal perception of the success of the implementation of transparency actions in Jalisco?	Level of success
Citizen participation	What is your personal perception of the success of the implementation of citizen participation actions in Jalisco?	Level of success

Three concepts measure level of success, in open government, transparency and citizen participation. To measure the level of success, we asked “What is your perception about the success of implementing open government actions in the State of Jalisco?”, “What is your perception about the success of implementing transparency actions in the State of Jalisco?” and “What is your perception about the success of implementing citizen participation actions in the State of Jalisco?” In the three cases, the response scale ranged from 1, not successful at all, to 7, totally successful.

3.5 Analysis

The sample of managers was divided based on the type of organization they belong two. We considered two groups: Government and CSO. The government group is composed by managers from State government departments and agencies, as well as municipalities in the State of Jalisco. The civil society group is composed by managers from universities, business companies, and non-profit organizations. The groups have sample size of: Government $n=$ 74, and CSO $n=$ 51.

The means of all measurements presented above were compared among groups. The means were compared using Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) test for difference in means. The WMW test is preferred over other tests (e.g., ANOVA or $t$ -test) for comparing the mean of two groups when the data is not paired (i.e. is not a before-after comparison) and is not normally distributed. Under these circumstances, the WMW test has more power and efficiency than other hypothesis tests (Fay & Proschan, 2010). The values for the group civil society are relatively normally distribution, whereas the values for the group government are highly skewed towards the highest scores.

A small value of the WMW test indicates that the mean difference among the groups is not statistically significant, whereas a WMW value above 105 indicates, with a 99% confidence, that the means are different. We tested the difference of means with the $t$ -test as a robustness check, obtaining the same conclusions than with the WMW test.

The difference of means test is followed by a boxplot analysis of the levels of success of open government, transparency and citizen participation. The boxplot analysis aims to display the non-normal distribution in both groups and how this can affect the interpretation of the results.

It is possible that the perception of success of open government, transparency and citizen participation is influenced by the use of technological tools that the governments use to promote these two types of initiatives. Thus, by using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) we tested the perception of importance and success, controlling by the use of the technological tools described in Table 2. The two sets of dummy variables displayed in the Table 2 were used as control variables for the Table 4 in next section.

Table 2
Control variables used in Table 4

What tools for […] do you know that the State Government uses?
Citizen participation	Transparency
Citizen participation	Citizen care office
Citizen care office	State government website
Blogs	Transparency state government website
E-mails	Blogs
Public forums	Wikis
Neighborhood meetings	Social networks
Transparency state government website	Other Web 2.0 tools
Wikis
Phone line
State government website
Social networks
Other Web 2.0 tools

4. Findings

This section presents the results derived from the analysis of our survey data. We analyzed quantitative data to compare the perception of government managers with civic society activists.

Table 3 summarizes the means and standard deviations for both groups (Government and CSO), as well as the WMW test for the difference of means. The level of development of open government values is split into four categories: access to information, citizen participation, accountability and use of new technologies. In all cases, the perception of development is higher in the government category. The WMW for all the four measurements indicates a statistically significant difference. The results of the perception of success, for open government, transparency and citizen participation show that the perception from government managers is statistically significantly higher than the perception from civil society managers.

Table 3
Comparison among groups (government and CSO)

Variable	Government		CSO		WMW
	$\bar{x}$	$s$	$\bar{x}$	$s$
Level of development of open government values
Access to information	5.9	1.3	4.0	1.5	616 ${}^{***}$
Citizen participation	5.1	1.4	3.3	1.3	643.5 ${}^{***}$
Accountability	5.8	1.3	3.0	1.4	339 ${}^{***}$
Use of new technologies and innovation	5.8	1.3	4.0	1.5	710 ${}^{***}$
Levels of success
Success of open government	5.8	1.1	3.6	1.4	433.5 ${}^{***}$
Success of transparency	6.0	1.0	4.0	1.5	519 ${}^{***}$
Success of citizen participation	5.7	1.3	3.7	1.3	577 ${}^{***}$

Figure 1 shows that the median score for civil society is lower than the median for government. When it comes to levels of success, the perception among both groups are closer to each other; yet, civil society also has a lower perception on average about the success of open government. In this case, the distribution of the data is also skewed in both groups, although on the opposite sides. For the group of civil society, there are outliers highly drives the average upwards, whereas for the group of government there are outliers taking the average downwards.

Figure 1.

Level of success of open government.

Figure 2.

Level of success of transparency.

Figure 2 shows that the median perception of importance of open government for civil society is lower than the median for government. It also shows that the civil society scores are normally distributed, whereas the scores for government are highly skewed. The difference between the two perceptions is quite significant, while the public managers consider the issue of open government very important, the CSO places its valuation at half the scale. These results illustrate the level of commitment of public managers with transparency and the level of relevance given to the engagement and work done by the mangers and their teams on the initiative.

Figure 3 shows that the perceived level of success in citizen participation initiatives is relatively similar among groups. The difference among the means is narrower, and the data is normally distributed in both groups. This indicates that the civil society values better the results of the State’s open government initiative on citizen participation.

Table 4

OLS results. Difference of success between government and civil society

	Open government	Transparency	Participation
Government	2.073 ${}^{***}$ (0.241)	1.657 ${}^{***}$ (0.244)	1.677 ${}^{***}$ (0.260)
Constant	3.390 ${}^{***}$ (0.314)	2.929 ${}^{***}$ (0.305)	2.953 ${}^{***}$ (0.325)
Control variables	Yes	Yes	Yes
Observations	125	125	125
R ${}^{2}$	0.471	0.503	0.426
Adjusted R ${}^{2}$	0.419	0.473	0.392

Note: ${}^{*}p<$ 0.1; ${}^{**}p<$ 0.05; ${}^{***}p<$ 0.01.

Figure 3.

Level of success of citizen participation.

All the descriptive statistics show that there is a significant difference in the perception of governmental actors and non-governmental organizations regarding the success of open government and transparency policies, as well as citizen participation. In all the cases, the government group has a higher perception about open government. This difference may be caused during the policy-making process, where some policies can cause political disaffection when these do not incorporate the demands or aspirations of interest groups.

Table 4 shows that the different perception about success between CSO and government managers are statistically significant. This regression model controls for the government’s use of citizen participation IT tools (see Section 3).1

As the independent variable (“Government”) is dichotomous, the coefficient of the Constant is the average of the civil society activists, whereas the coefficient of the variable Government represents the the difference between the average perception of civil society activists and government managers.

The average perception score of the success of open government from CSO is 3.39, and the perception score from public managers is 2.07 points higher. Regarding the perception of transparency, the average score for CSO managers is 2.92, whereas the average score of the perception of government managers is 1.65 points higher. Finally, in the perceived success of citizen participation, public managers scored 1.67 higher than CSO in their perception of success. These results confirm, through a formal hypothesis testing, the results observed in the three Figures above.

5. Discussion and implications

The results showed a consistent higher perception from public managers, compared with the managers of the CSO. When analyzing the effect size of these differences, we observed that the public manager’s perception of success is on average 58% higher than the perception from the CSO managers. The effect sizes show that the results are not only statistically significant, but meaningful in their magnitude. The strength of the divergence suggests that to some challenges of democratic regimes may appear, such as declining trust in government, citizens’ satisfaction and, ultimately, a declining legitimacy.

The research sheds light on some practical implications in relation to the results. It is important to interpret and explain the scope of the new findings. The findings show a difference of perceptions between the two sectors, which implies an asymmetry point of view or interpretation of the reality, with different opinions about the performance of public policies oriented towards social inclusion. Likewise, the results are evidence that open government policies face many barriers, not only in design and implementation, but in the ideologies and beliefs that citizens have in terms of their conception of government.

The aspirations of both sectors are inconsistent in the objectives of public policies. On the one hand, there is a positive view of public managers about policy performance and, on the other hand, the CSO has a negative perception of policy performance. An asymmetry of these dimensions implies a dissatisfaction on the part of civil society, which is a critical signal of citizens’ dissatisfaction that managers must address.

Social unrest is inherent in democracy, since citizens have the freedom and the right to question political action and reward or punish politicians through the electoral processes. Therefore, citizens’ dissatisfaction is likely to arise in any democratic regime, but when this dissatisfaction is addressed and incorporated within the institutionalized mechanisms of political participation, the observed gap in perception might fade. In this sense, the dispersion of perceptions shown in the study regarding transparency, citizen participation and open government may imply a factor that destabilizes the government and society.

Often, the CSO responsibilizes governments for the emergence or expansion of any public problem. These organized groups demand solutions and changes in public policies and the public administration, taking advantage of opportunity windows to gain a wider citizens’ support and, subsequently, influence the policy-making process. However, the dissatisfaction of the CSO does not always constitute an implicit threat to the government. On the contrary, if the dissatisfaction is well channeled, it can actively promote transformations in the policies of transparency, citizen participation and open government.

6. Conclusion

In sum, there is a great divergence between the perception of the CSO and the government of Jalisco. Among the various nuances to understand the development of transparency, citizen participation and open government policies, some elements to be considered can be discussed to advance the issues, such as establishing spaces for dialogue and collaboration between the sectors.

Open government is extending its popularity as a model of public management, but it is being built with different visions. The study allows us to get closer to the reality of public policies of transparency, citizen participation and open government in the State of Jalisco. The data provide evidence about the adoption of a new perspective of public governance. The data confirm that the policies analyzed are in an emerging phase in terms of its conception and development. Therefore, the results confirm a reality in which government openness is understood in a very heterogeneous way. In addition, it is possible to infer that citizen participation is an issue already consolidated within open government model.

The variable of “success” regarding open government in the State of Jalisco are relevant in order to understand the level of adoption and consolidation of this type of public policy. The findings of this study confirm that government assumes the issue with high importance within their public managers, however, they also point out that success has not yet been achieved at the same level. For its part, the CSO indicated medium and low levels in relation to the “success” with which the Government of Jalisco assumes open government. This leads us to conclude that the consolidation process of open government policies is at an early stage, in which the path of government opening or citizen participation is being explored, beyond the traditional limits, but without clarity.

The effort to test the variable “success” in the study is very relevant and works transversally – throughout transparency, citizen participation and open government. In this case, the results show a wide dispersion of the perception among the analyzed sectors, reflecting a need for strategic planning in order to achieve a transition from rhetoric to policy actions with public value.

Transparency is the element most associated with the term Open Government, and represents a trend in public policy and management. The results of the study allow us to infer that the CSO sector has criticism of the government for its policies of active and proactive transparency. However, the success gap in the perception of the two sectors represents evidence that should be considered to strengthen the dialogue between civil society and government to co-create policies of transparency and access to information.

Citizen participation is moving towards consolidating an institutional practice; this is empowering the civil society of Jalisco. However, the progress is very poor from the perspective of the CSO, while the perspective of the government is much more positivist on the issue. The complexity and importance of the topic deserves further studies to better understand how and why citizen participation, which is expected as a citizen-driven practice follows a similar pattern in the perceived success that open government and transparency.

The main contribution of this article was to empirically demonstrate the gap of the perceived success between government and organized civil society in open government and transparency policies, as well as citizen participation. The results suggest that government managers could strengthen their strategies to promote more effective spaces to collaborate and communicate with different sectors of society.

Some of the limitations of this article are the sample size and the limited external validity. Although the operationalization of the measurements, and the statistical methods are robust, the sample does not incorporate all sectors that may (under different definitions of citizen participation) comprise the CSO’s. Further, as a single case study based on Jalisco, the findings presented in this article cannot travel beyond this case study. Further confirmatory studies should be carried on to confirm or disprove these findings, where the perceptions of success are tested in different sectors and different cases in Mexico and other countries. Also, other methodologies (quantitative and qualitative) and analytical strategies should be used to compare the perceptions of success in open government, transparency and citizen participation. This will contribute to strengthen the empirical evidence, arguments and contribute ideas to better understand the gap of perceived success between sectors.

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Contrasting perceptions about transparency,citizen participation,and open government between civil society organization and government

Abstract

Keywords

1. Introduction

2. Literature review

3. Methodology

3.1 Survey design

3.2 Sample

3.3 Procedures

3.4 Measurement

Table 1 Description of open government, transparency and citizen participation measurements

Table 2 Control variables used in Table 4

Table 3 Comparison among groups (government and CSO)

6. Conclusion

References

Table 1
Description of open government, transparency and citizen participation measurements

Table 2
Control variables used in Table 4

Table 3
Comparison among groups (government and CSO)