Transparency, Policy Outcomes, and Incumbent Support

Abstract

Summary Government transparency has been discussed both as a way to decrease informational asymmetries between officeholders and citizens and as part of what makes for procedurally fair governance. These two different lines of argument generate predictions about how transparency should change voters’ reactions to economic and policy outcomes. First, under high transparency, voters should respond less positively to fiscal expansions. Second, they should become more sensitive to incumbents’ ability to deliver outcomes that generate benefits in the long‐run than to current tangible benefits. We test these arguments using municipality level data in Portugal. Controlling for variables that previous research has shown to drive electoral support for incumbents in local elections, only in the least transparent municipalities is support positively related with increases in local current expenditures, budget deficits, and municipal wages. Instead, where transparency is higher, voters are more likely to reward improvements in the quality of education.

Impacts of Budget Transparency on Economic and Political Outcomes

“…Similarly, Aguiar-Conraria, Magalhães and Veiga (2019) Some studies measure government budget procedures from questionnaires sent to budget officers of 19 OECD countries, grouping measures regarding transparency into four broad criteria: more information in fewer documents, independent verification, non-arbitrary language, and more justification (Alt & Lassen, 2003;Alt & Lassen, 2006a;Alt & Lassen, 2006b). The OECD/WB Budgeting Database (OWD) is the main source of data for Bastida and Benito (2007) and Benito and Bastida (2009) and their index, which contains forty dummy variables organised in three parts: (a) Budget Reports, (b) Specific Disclosures and Integrity, and (c) Control and Accountability.…”

Intergenerational Justice and Institutions for the Long Term

“…I will here zoom in on the former, which have dominated recent debates, especially among normative theorists (Tremmel, 2006;Thompson, 2010;Gardiner, 2014;Caney, 2016;Smith, 2019). But there is a growing literature on how institutions whose chief aim is not to promote farsighted policies, like proportional electoral rules (Lindvall, 2017;Finnegan, 2019), government transparency (Aguiar, et al, 2019), institutional capacity (Jacobs, 2011), and low corruption (Garri, 2010), crucially contribute to this end. Given that the diversity of sources of short-termism (see next section) invites a diversity of institutional responses, and that future-beneficial institutions may be easier to adopt, as they can be justified on independent grounds, one can only hope that research on future-beneficial institutions will further grow.…”

Intergenerational Justice and Institutions for the Long Term

“…I will here zoom in on the former, which have dominated recent debates, especially among normative theorists (Tremmel, 2006;Thompson, 2010;Gardiner, 2014;Caney, 2016;Smith, 2019). But there is a growing literature on how institutions whose chief aim is not to promote farsighted policies, like proportional electoral rules (Lindvall, 2017;Finnegan, 2019), government transparency (Aguiar, et al, 2019), institutional capacity (Jacobs, 2011), and low corruption (Garri, 2010), crucially contribute to this end. Given that the diversity of sources of short-termism (see next section) invites a diversity of institutional responses, and that future-beneficial institutions may be easier to adopt, as they can be justified on independent grounds, one can only hope that research on future-beneficial institutions will further grow.…”