Explaining County Government Fiscal Transparency in an Age of e-Government

Abstract

This research seeks to explain the fiscal transparency practices of individual U.S. counties by examining the extent of information shared with constituents via county government Web sites. This study evaluates a random sample of 400 U.S. counties, where 19 percent of those represented have populations of 100,000 or more residents, matching the same ratio of counties with populations of 100,000 or more residents nationally. We create a four-level categorical dependent variable measuring fiscal transparency and use a generalized ordered logit analysis with eight independent variables to explain the extent of fiscal transparency among the sample.

Determinants of Internet-enabled Transparency at the Local Level

“…There are 1055 counties in the Midwest region of the United States and 239 of those counties (22.65 percent) had no organizational Web site. This number was similar to that reported in Manoharan (2013b;23.5 percent), but lower than that reported by Harder and Jordan (2013;53.33 percent), and higher than that reported by Bernick et al (2014;9 percent). To control for the a priori effect of having no Web site, the analysis included only the 816 counties that had a Web site.…”

“…The presence of a nonwhite population was found to be a statistically significant predictor of governmental transparency (Bernick et al 2014;Borry 2012;Ho 2002;Huang 2007). Therefore:…”

“…Existing studies found that poverty had an inverse relationship on government transparency (Bernick et al 2014). Therefore:…”

“…Older residents were found to be less likely to use the Internet on a regular basis (Piotrowski and Ryzin 2007), and age was found to have an inverse relationship with higher levels of transparency (Bernick et al 2014;Borry 2012). Therefore:…”

The Principle of Transparency in the Ukrainian Decentralisation Reform

“…In the last decade, with evolving e-governance, transparency studies have relied mostly on information available on the community, district and region websites. On the district level, Bernick et al (2014) showed that such factors as appointed county manager, size of county board, number of full-time employees, requirements to submit an audit report to the federal government, unemployment rate, population age, a share of minority residents, heterogeneity of a territorial unit are important to understand the difference in fiscal information online presentation. Lowatcharin and Menifield (2015) analyzed larger district samples from the US Midwest with regard to a broader range of different factors (geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, and institutional) and found that such factors as district area, population density, percentage of minority population, educational attainment, and the council-manager form of government had a positive effect on Internet-backed fiscal transparency.…”