The relationship between transparent and participative government: A study of local governments in the United States

Eric W. Welch

114 citations0/0 files storedInternational Review of Administrative Sciences

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

E-Government and Public Services Administrative Law and Governance Public Policy and Administration Research

Abstract

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. Points for practitioners For practitioners, the article provides a framework for understanding the relationship between transparency and participation as two dimensions of open government. While in some departments these two dimensions are present at similar levels, in others they are not. For example, among five departments, police report the lowest overall participation and transparency levels, while parks and recreation and the mayor’s office report the highest transparency and participation levels, respectively. In addition, police departments report significantly higher transparency than participation, while the reverse is true for community development departments. The article provides public administrators with greater insight into causes of and relationships between transparency and participation.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 114 citations exist upstream.

References

1990Econometric Models and Economic Forecasts 2002Digital divide: civic engagement, information poverty, and the Internet worldwide 2001Digital Divide 2000Public Participation Methods: A Framework for Evaluation 2002The Theory of Incentives 2001The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model 1996Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations: a guide to strengthening and sustaining organizational achievement 2004E‐Government and the Transformation of Service Delivery and Citizen Attitudes

Cited by

2016Are small cities online? Content, ranking, and variation of U.S. municipal websites 2014Technology in government: How organizational culture mediates information and communication technology outcomes 2017Citizen Participation, Process, and Transparency in Local Government: An Exploratory Study 2016Determinants of data sharing in U.S. city governments 2016Transparency at the Parish Pump: A Field Experiment to Measure the Effectiveness of Freedom of Information Requests in England

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.