What conditions favor effective public transparency? A review article

Abstract

Academic studies of transparency have flourished in the last three decades. Nevertheless, comprehensive reviews of research on transparency have been limited, especially in Spanish. This research gap impedes our understanding of the overall body of knowledge on transparency and hinders the advancement of existing practices; this article, to address this gap, systematically reviews studies published on transparency and tries to answer these research questions: (1) How has the concept of transparency been defined and conceptualized in the literature? (2) What conditions favor transparency policies to have positive impacts? This research found diverse endogenous conditions and factors (controllable through the policy of transparency design) affecting the quality of outputs and procedures; they are necessary but insufficient prerequisites for the desired impacts. The exogenous factors (not controllable through public design) are divided into social, institutional, structural, political, and economical. Generally, they tend to coincide in that societies with prior institutional trust, sound educational and health policies, and meritocratic administrations are more likely to have effective transparency, which means better governance. Finally, we discuss future directions of research.