The effects of transparency regulation on political trust and perceived corruption: Evidence from a survey experiment

Abstract

Scholarly evidence of transparency's beneficial effects on trust and perceptions of corruption remains debated and confined to the study of public administration. We contribute to this debate by extending the study of its effects to transparency legislation concerning members of parliament (MPs), political parties, and business interest groups. In an online experiment conducted in Ireland with 1373 citizens, we find that transparency in political donations improves trust in political parties, while asset declaration for conflict of interest prevention reduces perceptions of corruption toward MPs. However, transparency in lobbying is found to have no impact on attitudes toward business interest groups. This supports the common expectation that transparency improves political trust and reduces perceptions of corruption, but also confirms its complex effects. The study improves our understanding of transparency beyond open government providing an evaluation of different regulatory policies aimed at making the activities of parties, MPs, and lobby groups transparent.

Lobbying transparency and attitudes towards interest groups: a survey experiment

“…Finally, this study contributes to the policy analysis of lobbying regulations (Kanol 2018;Crepaz 2020;Crepaz and Arikan 2023), suggesting that while useful, lobbying transparency may have a weaker direct impact on the public than what assumed and hoped for by governments, advocates and international organisations that promote their introduction. While the results of a single experiment remain, of course, limited in scope and are restricted in terms of external validity, they do widen the debate around the usefulness of transparency in the realm of lobbying.…”

“…First, I argue that higher levels of political interest moderate the beneficial effects of lobbying transparency. While research on citizens' attitudes towards interest groups is rare (see Frangi et al 2017;O'Neill 2009), it has been recently established that individuals tend to have a lower understanding of interest groups and their involvement in policymaking compared to that of political parties and members of parliament (Crepaz and Arikan 2023). This is also evident from historical poll data as well as more recent studies that discuss citizens' attitudes towards lobbying (Benedict 2004;Alemanno 2017).…”

“…Description of Variables used in the Study. 11 In other transparency studies (including our own) legitimacy is sometimes treated as separate yet closely related concept to trust (De Fine Licht et al 2014;Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer 2014;Crepaz and Arikan 2023). The analysis for each component of the trust index was conducted separately in Table A4 (Online Appendix -5.…”