Purpose – Cases of corruption, embezzlement, theft and fraud, abuse of discretion, favoritism, nepotism, clientelism, and abuse of power in governments have led to a growing demand from society to access public information. In response to this demand, governments have been forced to be more transparent in the conduct of their activities. The information transparency index (TI) may be conditioned by economic and political characteristics of local governments affecting the information provided. What factors influenced the index of municipal transparency? Literature about transparency is largely based on the explanations of the agency theory and the legitimacy theory. Based on the postulates of both theories, the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, study the index transparency in Spanish municipalities, and, second, determine the main features that are affecting the index of transparency. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from Transparency International Spain ranking and from official sources. Univariate and multivariate analysis are performed for the treatment of data. Findings – The results shows that political factors like electoral turnout, political ideology, and political competition have a significant effect on the index of transparency. Gender has no significant effect on the index of transparency. Originality/value – This study is a contribution to the growing body literature of transparency in order to understand what explains the variations of the TI among municipalities.

Service provision by local governments can be delivered using in-house bureaucracies, private firms, and partnerships with other governments or the not-forprofit sector. This production decision has been a major focus of discussion among scholars, practitioners and political agents for the last quarter of a century. The transaction costs framework is an important tool to analyse decisions regarding the production of local services. In this paper, the authors employ this framework to analyse service delivery in Portugal and find that service characteristics and the local political environment play a key role in local officials' choice among the three governance mechanisms to deliver public services. KEY WORDS: Service delivery, transaction costs, governance mechanismsDue to their level of proximity and periodic transfers of competences from the national government, local governments in Portugal gained importance over the past two decades as service providers. Their functional responsibilities have been extended significantly over several areas including water supply, promotion of regional development, solid waste collection, emergency management, health care, education, and land use management, among many others. To cope with all these challenges, local governments changed from a general, multi-purpose organisation to a complex network of relationships with other public bodies, private agents, and not-for-profit organisations.

The global financial crisis has had an impact on Local Government forcing it to be more transparent in management of public resources. This article examines theoretically and empirically the determinants of the levels of transparency in Local Governments based on the agency and legitimacy theories. For the purpose of this study, the analysis is based on the Spanish municipalities over a period of 4 years, between 2008 and 2012. Running a random effect panel data model, our results showed that transparency is associated with economic and political factors. Unemployment rate, gender, electoral turnout, and political strength have a significant effect on the level of transparency. For other variables like investment and fiscal pressure, we did not find significant evidence of their effect on the level of transparency. We conclude that the factors that best explain the variation in the level of transparency in the period of crisis are associated with political factors.

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PurposeThe main objective of this paper is to analyse the content and extent of human capital disclosure by Spanish companies. It studies various factors related to the board of directors’ composition and functioning. These factors can be seen as mechanisms of corporate governance and the moderating role of managerial ownership, which help predict the behaviour of managers in relation to the human capital disclosure.Design/methodology/approachThis study develops and applies a more comprehensive framework for coding information on human capital, integrating the intellectual capital and social responsibility perspectives in order to explain the content and extent of human capital disclosure. The research was based on a content analysis of 210 corporate reports from 2007 to 2016. A system-GMM estimator was used to test the hypotheses in four dynamic linear regression models of balanced panel data in order to address concerns of endogeneity.FindingsThe results show that companies are adapting to new regulations and voluntarily disclosing information on human capital – a trend which signals their commitment to responsible attitudes towards employees and stakeholders. The results also show that board composition and functioning are mechanisms of supervision, control and legitimacy that promote human capital disclosure, with managerial ownership acting as moderator for aligning interests between managers and stakeholders.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the literature on human capital disclosure by introducing a broader conception of human capital to coding information. It accomplishes this through considering aspects of the intellectual capital and social responsibility approaches, which provide a better understanding of companies’ human capital disclosure. In addition, it seeks to enrich the debate about the effects of corporate governance mechanisms– such as boards of directors and managerial ownership – on human capital disclosure.

This article analyses a New Public Management (NPM) style of reform recently introduced in Portuguese public administration. The reform introduces new organizations to a method of delivering public services called ‘Citizen Shops’ (CS) (Lojas dos Cidadãos). Several public services are concentrated in a single building whose management follows the practices of the private sector concerning service delivery and opening times, rather like a ‘shopping centre’. ‘Citizen Shops’ is a kind of agencification and is an attempt to avoid the constraints of civil service red tape and bureaucratic resistance to change. The author argues that the extent to which new ideas were imported from NPM was limited and constrained by the institutional framework and the culture prevailing in Portuguese bureaucracy. Citizen Shops reproduced the hierarchical and centralized nature of service delivery and followed the traditional patterns of control. The prevailing structure is an important constraint on NPM development.

Despite the growing interest on the influence of gender in local government, the relationship between women's political representation on municipalities, as council member or as female mayors, and transparency is an underresearched topic. This article analyses the political representation of women in Spanish local councils and their influence on the level of transparency. Results show that women's political representation in municipalities has a positive influence on the level of transparency, increasing information transparency and reducing information asymmetry.

The influence of the New Public Management (NPM) movement in Portuguese administrative reform has been one of the country's noticeable trends in recent decades (Araújo 2001, 2002a; Rocha 2001). Many governments have aimed to introduce a new managerial rationality in public services. The literature about administrative reform shows that institutional bureaucracies resist change, particularly when it challenges prevailing practices and procedures (Bjur and Caiden 1978; Olsen 1991). Thus, the influence of NPM in administrative reform has found different expressions and, in several countries, the introduction of NPM ideas is a limited and superficial phenomenon (Pollitt 2000). This paper contributes to these debates. It examines the influence of New Public Management ideas in Portuguese administrative reform and discusses improvements in the way public services are implementing change using new managerial tools in Portugal: the Activity Plan (AP) and the Activity Report (AR). The data collected from official reports and a questionnaire show that the juridical‐administrative model persists and transforms both Activity Plan and Activity Report into little more than a formality, another routine to be followed.