International Review of Administrative Sciences

The term open government is often used to describe initiatives of putting government information on the Internet. This conceptualization is too restricted since open government is not only about openness in informational terms (vision) but also about openness in interactive terms (voice). On the basis of an analysis of 103 articles, this article provides insight into the concepts of openness, transparency and participation, their interactions, and the manner in which they have been discussed in the literature. This analysis shows the differences and similarities between economic, political science and legal perspectives on open government and argues that a multidisciplinary approach needs to be taken. The authors conclude that open government is much too important to leave it to the ‘techies’: scientists and practitioners with backgrounds in law, economics, political science and public administration should also get involved to build sound connections between vision and voice that facilitate active citizenship.

Fiscal transparency is fundamentally important but difficult to achieve. The conceptualization of transparency has to be more sophisticated than current rhetoric implies. Analytical tools relating to the generic concept of transparency can be applied to public expenditure. Achieving transparency about public expenditure presents challenges that require explicit strategies in the context of what can be very different sets of local conditions. This article identifies the specific meaning of transparency about public expenditure, defined in terms of the four directions of transparency: inwards, outwards, upwards and downwards. It identifies barriers to the effective transparency of public expenditure, characterizing these as intrinsic or constructed. Tackling these barriers, especially those constructed by policy actors, constitutes a route towards more effective transparency, not only about public expenditure itself but about surrogates for it. It is not just quantity that matters: different varieties of transparency will have differential effects on the achievement of public policy objectives. How transparency mechanisms are structured will therefore shape their impact on public policy – on efficiency, on equity and on democratic accountability.

Declining citizen trust in government is an important driver for NPM-style reforms. Increasing people’s knowledge by providing factual knowledge about government performance outcomes is seen as an important way of increasing citizen trust in government. Does this promise hold or is knowledge about performance outcomes not that important? Two rivalling hypotheses are being investigated. One proposition postulates a link between knowledge and trust, whereas the alternative hypothesis borrows from social-psychological research arguing that subconscious and affective cues are more important. In order to investigate this question, this article presents the results of an experiment (N = 658) investigating the effect of performance outcome transparency on citizen trust in a specific government organization. Four groups visited different websites with varying degrees of transparency and performance outcome. The results demonstrate that the link between transparency and trust in a government organization is determined by a mix of knowledge and feelings. Further, the overall effect of transparency is limited. Pre-existing and fundamental ideas about what government does and whether it is benign or not are far more determining than a single experience with a government organization. This article concludes that knowledge about performance outcomes is only part of the link between transparency and trust, and that more realistic views about transparency’s effects should be developed.

The European Parliament, like any parliament, needs information for scrutinizing executive decision-making. But how does it process this information in practice? This article focuses on the European Parliament’s increasing grip on ‘comitology’ decision-making: committees composed of national civil servants, producing executive measures that are adopted by the European Commission. Two types of changes are addressed: organizational changes and changes in working methods of EP staff. The analysis shows that the European Parliament has effectively built up a system of decentralized police-patrol oversight, but not following more information rights as such but rather as a result of its increasing political powers. The article concludes that information only affects the behaviour of the European Parliament in combination with very specific as opposed to quite general or diffuse political rights.

The relationship between transparency and participation of government is not well articulated in the literature. Transparency provides stakeholders with knowledge about the processes, structures and products of government. Participation refers to the quantity, quality and diversity of input of stakeholders into government decision-making. Greater transparency and participation are often considered to operate side by side. However, in the Internet age the change in the magnitude of information disclosure may outweigh the change in the level of participative government. This article uses data from a 2010 national survey of five US local government agencies to test hypotheses about the relationship between transparency and participation and the factors that affect them. Findings show that participation is positively associated with transparency, but transparency does not lead to participation. In addition, organizations that are under stronger influence from external stakeholders report higher levels of participation but in some cases higher levels of external influence dampen transparency.

It has been said that the 2010 WikiLeaks disclosures mark ‘the end of secrecy in the old fashioned, cold-war-era sense’. This is not true. Advocates of WikiLeaks have overstated the scale and significance of the leaks. They also overlook many ways in which the simple logic of radical transparency – leak, publish, and wait for the inevitable outrage – can be defeated in practice. WikiLeaks only created the illusion of a new era in transparency. In fact the 2010 leaks revealed the obstacles to achievement of increased transparency, even in the digital age.

The article discusses the concept of procedural administrative transparency and aims to investigate the extent to which the legal provisions of Law no. 52/2003 on transparency in decision-making are actually implemented by the local administrations from the rural communities in the Transylvania region, Romania. The main research questions are: Where are the weaknesses in the implementation of Law no. 52/2003 in the rural settings in Romania? Why do they occur? What could be changed to alleviate these weaknesses? Based on a mixed method approach – surveys followed by direct observation and informal interviews – we determined that the implementation of procedural transparency requirements is low and in many cases local public authorities comply only ‘for the record’ with the provisions of the law. The main challenge with regard to implementation is the existence of universal provisions for all local public authorities, irrespective of their administrative capacity, existing cultural and social characteristics of public participation and communication in rural communities as well as the relationship between central and local tiers of the government. In conclusion, the authors argue that the implementation level of these requirements could be enhanced by their inclusion in a general procedural administrative law.

The use of Turnaround Management Strategies (TMS) in public administration has received growing interest among both researchers and practitioners who deal with public performance. However, our theoretical and empirical knowledge about TMS suffers from significant lacunae. This research presents results from a unique empirical survey that tests the effect of TMS on group-level Organizational Citizenship Behavior. One hundred and twenty-six senior leaders of English local authorities participated in the study. The findings show that local authorities that implemented repositioning and reorganization at the organizational level to a high extent experienced high levels of group-level Organizational Citizenship Behavior, while high implementation of reorganization at the personnel level was linked to low group-level Organizational Citizenship Behavior. Group-level Organizational Citizenship Behavior was indifferent to retrenchment strategies. Implications and suggestions for future studies are discussed.