Strengthening Institutions and Democracy Through Transparency: Analysis of Spanish Municipalities

For several decades, most European countries have been implementing transparency and open government policies with the aim of providing citizens with new mechanisms for controlling institutional activity, improving accountability to citizens, and increasing citizen participation in decision-making. In Spain, the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy approved a transparency law in 2014 to address the growing discredit of politics among citizens resulting from, among other things, numerous corruption scandals. Since then, Spanish public administrations, at all levels, have implemented various initiatives to promote public dissemination of government activity (publication of the agendas of public officials), strengthen control of undesirable conduct (registers of interest groups), allow citizen access to public information and data (transparency portals), as well as increase citizen participation in decision-making processes. However, the implementation of these policies occurs at an uneven pace, both due to the disparity of resources and administrative leadership between public administrations (regional governments and municipalities with fewer inhabitants have fewer economic resources) and due to the ideological opposition of, for example, the extreme right to these accountability initiatives. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the development of transparency policies at the local level in Spain around two dimensions: on the one hand, examining the design of transparency initiatives developed in the 100 most populated Spanish municipalities to detect possible “gaps and weaknesses” in the “Spanish model” and, on the other hand, analyzing the possible political and administrative causes that explain an uneven implementation. Our empirical strategy is based on the analysis of an original database created from consulting the websites of Spanish municipalities, which collects information in various areas of accountability, active publicity, fight against corruption, and citizen participation. In addition, the opinion of public officials on the need for transparency policies is analyzed based on a questionnaire specifically developed for this research.