Methodology for transparency evaluation: procedures and problems

Abstract

Núria Simelio SolàThe approval of the Transparency Law in Spain in 2013, along with concern about corruption, good governance and accountability has led to a significant increase in studies on transparency of administrations in recent years. Methods: The objective of this article is to expose the different methodological complexities in order to analyse the transparency of the contents published by the public administrations in aspects such as the definition of transparency itself, the object of study, the users or the recipients. Results: A model of analysis of the transparency of the webs of the municipalities is presented: the Infoparticipa project. The methodology we present is based on innovative tools that have established a map of local transparency in Spain. Discussion and conclusions: The Infoparticipa Map has transcended the academic field showing its social utility by allowing the improvement of the information published in the webs.

Health Transparency and Communication on the Government Websites of Ibero-American Countries: The Cases of Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Spain

“…The two countries with public health infrastructure (Ecuador and Spain), in comparison, have greater measures of transparency than those with mixed public-private health systems do (Chile and Colombia). In those cases, citizens are not conceived of as auditors, [3,12] nor are key aspects such as public income and expenses shown in a profound manner [40]. Instead, we observed that a conceptualization of transparency is imposed on websites associated with digital repositories.…”

“…However, their common denominator, although it has nuances, is the scarce civic commitment of these websites to the citizens that the websites serve and represent. Instead of promoting an audit of the contents [12] or an active search for information and even personalized access [10], the dispersion of the data suggests constant omissions of information and a hyper-concentration motivated by an obligation to comply with a specific law. For example, on this point, the remuneration of the positions and employees is sometimes offered with codes that are not necessarily known and may be unintelligible, in just the same manner as budget execution, if available.…”

“…This study, of a non-experimental nature, has a descriptive and correlational scope and was designed on the basis of the Infoparticipa project [12], which presented a methodological proposal with which to evaluate the transparency of Spanish local public administrations on their websites from a communicative perspective. This means that the importance of publishing complete, as well as understandable, accessible, and reusable, information is considered to enable citizens to monitor and evaluate the actions of elected political leaders and facilitate their participation in public affairs.…”

“…In the Infoparticipa project, a list of 52 indicators is proposed to examine transparency in public administration [12]. In this study, we have created a new version to address a new field, that of health, from a comparative international perspective, considering that each country has a different political and administrative organization, as well as its own legislation.…”

“…However, in operational terms, the scope that transparency should have remains a contentious matter. Some authors demand a total openness of information, using terms such as "radical transparency" [8] or "hypertransparency" [9], or for the options available on websites to be personalized [10] by proposing participation methods to agree on evaluation methodologies [11] or civic audits [12], whereas others question how transparency has been addressed in such studies [13].…”