The Organizational Effects of Public Transparency Regulation

The adoption of policies of transparency is usually grounded on their effects on public governance and control of corruption. Despite its theoretical and conceptual richness, transparency is usually defined as the result of publishing information on official websites. Consequently, most related literature has focused on such issues as institutional performance, levels of regulation compliance, and effects of transparency on citizen trust toward institutions. However, most transparency regulations also convey the idea that these policies should have an impact on the way public administrations function internally. At the very least, these regulations compel public administrators to adopt organizational changes to achieve certain levels of compliance, which in turn may bring forth changes in organizational culture. Yet, although such changes have been identified and analyzed in several cases, most empirical literature on this issue focuses at best on a very limited number of cases, thus hindering a generalized understanding of the phenomenon at hand. With these limitations in mind, this paper analyzes the organizational effects of transparency regulation on a large number of highly comparable organizational units. In particular, it combines rich survey and fieldwork data from municipalities in Spain to analyze patterns of organizational change and the factors behind the adoption of distinct strategies to adapt to a common regulatory environment.