Our paper investigates the intertwined relation among transparency, civic capital and political accountability in a large sample of Italian municipalities using a new indicator of institutional transparency. Firstly, we test the hypothesis that civic capital affects transparency of public administrations; secondly, we verify whether in municipalities where civic capital is high, citizens' attention toward government accountability is also high, making it politically unfeasible to disregard the demand for transparency. We find that civic capital positively affects transparency and the latter, in turn, is politically rewarding for the local administrators only conditional to the level of civic capital. Our findings are robust to different samples and endogeneity concerns.
| INTRODUCTIONFostering transparency is one of the policies undertaken in contemporary democracies to monitor the performance of the public administrations, promote the integrity of public officials and favor accountability (OECD, 2015). Transparency represents a useful tool to address the problems of information asymmetry characterizing the relationship between the principal, i.e., the stakeholders, and the agent, i.e., policy makers, whose interests may indeed be conflicting (Heald, 2006). On the one hand, making available clear and free information on public activities, transparency may lower for citizens the costs of getting informed, reducing free-riding and enhancing their monitoring capability (Aguiar-Conraria et al., 2019). On the other hand, sharing a set of values which goes beyond narrow self-interest, We acknowledge that this paper is a research outcome of the project MIUR PRIN 2017 -2017CRLZ3F "PolitiCanti. The Politicisation of Corruption and