Transparency, civic capital and political accountability: A virtuous relation?

Abstract

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

Response, Awareness and Requester Identity in Foi Law: Evidence from a Field Experiment

“…However, approximately a third of municipalities appear to ignore the provisions of FOI publicity. The study underscores a considerable heterogeneity among municipalities, aligning with the notion that transparency is spatially determined (Galli et al, 2020;Albanese et al, 2021). It is important to note that this study primarily focused on proactive compliance, a dimension that has been shown in other contexts to not necessarily correlate directly with responsiveness (Michener and Nichter, 2022).…”

“…Another conceivable factor is civic capital, which is markedly more abundant in Northern Italian regions than their Southern counterparts (Putnam, 1993). Albanese et al (2021), through an econometric analysis of data from a sample of municipalities, establish a positive correlation between civic capital and transparency, asserting that the political dividends of transparency are influenced by the level of civic capital. Our findings align with this perspective, suggesting that in Northern regions, public administrations are more inclined to respond to FOI requests from legal experts, foreseeing potential political benefits.…”

¿Qué condiciones favorecen una transparencia pública efectiva? Artículo de revisión

“…Bauhr y Grimes (2014) muestran que los países con mayores niveles de confianza institucional y menos radicalizadas por la política partidista tienden a tener transparencia efectiva. Albanese et al (2020) nos muestran cómo en ciudades italianas donde el capital cívico es alto, la demanda de accountability es alta y ello hace que la transparencia no pueda ser hurtada a la ciudadanía. Esto nos lleva a reconocer que, para que la transparencia produzca eficacia y control, debe partir de una base previa de confianza, y movilización (Parent et al, 2005;Mabillard y Pasquier, 2016).…”