Municipalities and proactive online disclosure of information about the elections

Transparency is widely acknowledged to be a key component of good governance. Not only it promotes responsibility and makes institutional control possible, but if voters are given more knowledge about political processes it may also increase trust and legitimacy in democratic governments. This study focuses on the proactive disclosure of information at the local level in a relatively new democracy – Slovakia, a country with a fragmented municipal structure and with a high number of municipalities with a small population. We collected data from the websites of all 2926 municipalities and analyze factors influencing the publication of electoral information before local and regional elections. These took place on the same date for the first time in 2022, therefore confronting voters with a high number of possible candidates, while the central state bodies left the responsibility to publish this type of information up to municipalities. Using the multilevel logistic regression, we tested which municipal and regional characteristics affected the ability to provide information about the candidates. While previous research showed that municipalities with independent mayors and female mayors may perform better in proactive transparency and those with larger minority communities may perform worse, our study does not confirm these findings. On the other hand, results support the conclusions, which claim that economic factors play a significant role. Towns with a larger population and more personnel are more likely to publish complete electoral information. As well as this, municipalities with a higher unemployment rate and those in the least developed regions of Slovakia are less likely to publish them. Overall, the findings strengthen the outcomes of previous research, which showed that towns with a small population confront significant challenges in revealing information to the public.