Abstract
Recent years have seen an increase of critical perspectives on government transparency. Some consider its conceptualization too simplistic leading to over-enthusiastic promises. Other, more empirical studies show that transparency can create costs or adverse effects. This qualitative meta-analysis of scholarship reviews transparency research from 1996 onwards to map the pitfalls, shortcomings and negative dynamics of transparency policies. The analysis draws on policy studies, notably literature on policy failure. While systematizing the insights generated so far, the analysis also provides an overview of blind spots and shortcomings in transparency scholarship regarding the effects and outcomes of transparency policies.
Plain Language Summary
Governments announce loudly and clearly their objective of being more transparent. They characterise this as an absolute good, for who can be against more transparency? However, more critical voices consider this too simplistic and qualify the promises of politicians and governments as being overtly enthusiastic. Some have also identified the costs and problems associated with them. This article reviews these critical voices from the academic literature, mapping the problems that emerge with transparency.
Introduction
In the last three decades, transparency has emerged as a democratic value. Transparency policies are advertised as a panacea for all kinds of ‘diseases’ in the public realm, such as low citizen trust, corruption, bad performance, low accountability and power abuse by public officials. Indeed, a variety of studies have confirmed the benefits of transparency, for example, increasing participation (Kim & Lee, 2012); reducing corruption (Bauhr et al., 2019; Chen & Neshkova, 2019), perception of public sector performance (Porumbescu, 2017). Thereby, evaluations have been based on processes (Herz, 2009; Holsen & Worthy, 2010; Villeneuve, 2014), on outputs (Holsen & Pasquier, 2010; Schwanitz, 2007) or have studied the impact of transparency policies (Peisakhin & Pinto, 2010; Piotrowski, 2009; Relly & Sabharwal, 2009), oftentimes labelled ‘sunshine laws’, leading to Brandeis’s famous statement that ‘sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants’ for the ills of government.
In recent years, however, there is an increased scepticism to what degree the transparency agenda delivers on its promises. A variety of theoretical contributions have argued that the very conception of transparency itself renders it prone to failure (Albu & Flyverbom, 2016; Christensen & Cheney, 2015; Fenster, 2015). Such challenges to the conceptual foundations of transparency have stirred more critical research investigating to what extent transparency policies might fail to achieve their objectives. In other words: can too much sunshine cause sunburns?
There is, however, a lack of comprehensive analysis of the problematic and potentially adverse dynamics that transparency policies might bring about. Building on a qualitative meta-analysis of 137 scholarly articles between 1996 and 2019, the paper identifies common types of transparency failures and reasons for why they occur with the goal of supporting the development of better policy responses in the long run. The objective is to create a broader empirical baseline for understanding how and why transparency policies can fail. This serves the purpose to better inform future transparency reforms to be more effective and increase their impact. At the same time, the paper will complement critical transparency studies, whose reviews have thus far been on a primarily theoretical basis, with a review empirical findings.
Conceptualizing Transparency Dimensions
Government transparency has been defined as the ‘… conduct of public affairs in the open or otherwise subject to public scrutiny’ (Birkinshaw, 2006, p. 189). As one of the key premises for better governance (Hood, 2006), transparency has served as a driver for institutional and legal reforms. Transparency is an umbrella term for a variety of programmes and policies to enhance public sector visibility. Schauer (2010) structures transparency in three distinct dimensions –‘Transparency as Regulation’, ‘Transparency as Democracy’ and ‘Transparency as Epistemology’. This three-pronged understanding of transparency serves as a useful guide to better identify and distinguish the nature of the often transversal and overlapping promises associated with transparency policies (see Table 1 below), and to evaluate if and to what extent these promises hold.
Dimensions of Transparency and Related Promises.
As a regulatory function, transparency is presented as a cost-effective strategy to exercise control over institutions by making their activities public. Drawing on rational choice theory, the relation between citizens and public institutions is conceived of as a principal-agent relationship. Transparency promises to overcome the imbalance of information between both parties, allowing to scrutinize and potentially sanction agents. Moreover, observability is thought to reduce agents’ incentives to shirk. In short, transparency forms the precondition for accountability and better management.
Regarding the democratic dimension, transparency allows citizens to form opinions and weigh political options. Policies directly related to this dimension include the right to know, the contribution to a strong democracy and checks and balances (Meijer et al., 2015). Transparency is thus expected to promote trust and legitimacy as well as broader participation in the political process.
Finally, transparency as epistemology presumes that access to and circulation of information perpetuates knowledge, understanding, rationality and ultimately progress. The free availability of information facilitates the identification of truth and produces more knowledge and thus progress (Schauer, 2010).
Materials and Methods
This study focuses on the limitations of transparency in fulfilling its promises. Using policy evaluation and policy failure analytical frameworks, it proposes a qualitative meta-analysis of academic literature. It aims at identifying and synthesizing, based on existing and published primary data, the various detrimental dynamics or ‘failures’ of transparency policies pertaining to public institutions. This section presents the data collection strategy used to identify the articles and the frameworks applied for analysing the results.
Eligibility Criteria and Article Identification
Articles eligible for inclusion should: (a) test the practical implementation of transparency policies and programmes in the public sector (including documentary transparency, organizational transparency, transparency of decision-making, computer-mediated transparency, open data, fiscal transparency); discuss potential detrimental consequences of transparency policies; (b) be published in English. For accessibility reasons, and due to its broad impact on academia and policy development the analysis focused on English language publications; (c) being published in the period 1996 to 2019, which covers most of the work in the field of transparency research. No restrictions in terms of study design and country covered have been applied.
Relevant articles were identified in a three-step process, starting with a broad search in academic databases, followed by a targeted search in relevant journals. The analysis focused exclusively on journal publications and amongst those original research articles. An analysis of policy papers, books or opinion pieces, might lead to different results and could be a future terrain for analysis; they are not included in this analysis.
In a broad, open-ended search in ISI Web of Knowledge – one of the key academic databases – (see Table 2), the following keywords were used: ‘transparency’ as an umbrella term, ‘access to information’ and ‘freedom of information’ as terms pertaining to a specific legal framework enabling documentary transparency; and ‘open government’ as a term including a variety of functions for government openness. Articles had one or more of these terms used in the title or the abstract of the article. 1 The search focused on academic disciplines directly linked to the study of transparency and its role in public institutions: Political Sciences and Public Administration.
Material Identified Through Open Ended Search on ISI Web of Knowledge.
The database-wide search was complemented by a targeted search in a selection of specific journals through Scopus (see Table 3). For our search, we selected the top 10 journals in the field of public administration according to impact factor (InCite-Journal Citation Report, 2018). 2 The list of journals was further complemented by public administration journals with a dedicated relevance for the transparency research field, 3 namely ‘Government Information Quarterly’; ‘International Journal of Administrative Sciences’; ‘Information Polity’ and ‘International Review of Administrative Sciences’. The search terms used within Scopus were identical to the first round of research and applied to title, abstract of keywords of journal articles.
Relevant Publication Identified Through Journal-Specific Search, Second Stage of Data Collection.
The articles identified in step 1 (open-ended search) and step 2 journal specific search generated in sum 1780 search hits. These were pre-selected based on title and abstract regarding their relevance to the research question, either testing the practical implementation of transparency policies; discussing potential negative consequences of transparency. 4 Duplicates emerging from the search in two databases were eliminated. This step provided a focused list of potentially relevant articles (n = 306).
After a full-text detailed review of remaining publications, 137 articles were selected as fitting the focus of the research. The review of identified articles was conducted by three different researchers to ensure the reliability of an inclusion or exclusion of publications.
Analytical Framework
As mentioned at the outset of this paper, transparency policies are conventionally perceived to be supportive of good governance. However, more recent scholarship as raised concerns about the negative impacts of transparency. For the purpose of this analysis, we will conceptualize the downside of transparency through classical policy analysis, policy evaluation and more specifically policy failure literature offers clear and actionable framework to distinguish the various aspects of policy limits. Our analysis follows the approaches proposed by Weiss (1997), Suchman (1977) and more recently Stame (2010), offering a distinction between:
(1) Implementation Failure means a failure to achieve proximate goals: this means failure to achieve visibility, publicity, openness, information reception. The pre-conditions for success according to conceptual goals.
(2) Theory Failure means that the achievement of proximate goals does not lead to anticipated outcome: this means that even if transparency is achieved, its democratic, epistemic or regulatory promises do not hold or only partially hold.
Besides identifying the types of failure, the analysis also considers why transparency policies or parts thereof fail. Drawing on Hudson et al. (2019), the analysis distinguishes between four common reasons why policies might fail:
(1) Policies might be launched with too optimistic expectations;
(2) Policy implementation can be challenged by dispersed governance or contextual appropriateness;
(3) Policy failure can be caused by a lack of collaboration and integration of actors and stakeholders and
(4) Policies that are tailored around short-term political wins might lack the complex, long-term engagement required to actually make a policy work.
Eligible articles were analysed based on an original analytical grid, capturing both formal criteria of a publication as well as a more nuanced analysis of transparency failures, notably types of and reasons for failure. This then makes it possible to evaluate the results through the transparency promises as structured by Schauer (2010). Table 4 below summarizes the analytical criteria and possible responses.
Identified Transparency Failures as Related to Transparency Dimensions.
Limitations
For empirical evidence generated, single-country case studies, notably focusing on the United States, prevail. This creates a number of questions regarding generalizability of the analysed failures of transparency. This is especially the case considering the context sensitivity outlines above. Also, there appears very limited evidence generated from a longitudinal perspective (e.g. process-tracing, long-term data evidence).
Another clear limitation is to be found in the choice of the data sources, that is, published academic papers, excluding valuable other evidence or studies in which an a priori formulated hypothesis was not confirmed (publication bias).
Results
This section presents types of failures of transparency policies, before moving on to explore potential reasons why these failures arise. The analysis distinguishes between implementation and theory failure. Related to each of these two categories, the analysis carves out common ‘themes’ that are identified in the literature. These themes generally reflect ways in which the promises of transparency discussed at the outset of this article fail to materialize.
Implementation Failure
Failure to Achieve Publicity
A variety of articles analysed for this study point to the challenge of rendering transparency effective, meaning that information is not only provided, but also received. The difficulties and failure to achieve to achieve what Naurin (2006) calls ‘publicity’. According to him, effective transparency is heavily dependent on information to be processed and contextualized (Naurin, 2006, p. 93). The mere provision of information does not necessarily lead to its recognition; rather it needs to be presented in a ‘digestible’ format. Frequently, information is disclosed in a ‘confusing, irrelevant, incorrect or unprecise’ format. Moreover, a lack of salience and timeliness might render information ineffective for public discourse. A one-way stream of information broadcasted to the citizen without context or opportunity for exchange risks a wrong interpretation of citizens and if left to their own construction they can construe information into politics of scandal (Porumbescu, 2017).
While aggregated data is easier to be received, it leaves less room for reinterpretation. On the contrary, disaggregated data allows for more interpretation but requires mediation to make it understandable to the public (Rajao & Jarke, 2018). While aggregated data takes longer to release and might thus be rendered useless for policy making, disaggregated data is faster, but also prone to errors (Rajao & Jarke, 2018). If holistic policy evaluations are replaced by computer-mediated transparency which is ‘unidirectional, structured and decontextualized’ it does not always best represent what is occurring de facto (Michener & Ritter, 2017).
Several authors discuss the fact that more information might rather lead to information overload (Mol, 2010; Roberts, 2012). Moreover, information might be misinterpreted or selectively received: ‘… very often the public is unable to properly process even rather simple information because of “wired in” congenital, systematic cognitive biases’ (Etzioni, 2010, p. 399). Previous knowledge and disposition of information recipients might have a moderating effect on transparency (Grimmelikhuijsen & Meijer, 2012). Such prior knowledge makes it hard to persuade citizens; they are unlikely to receive new information. The effects of transparency are context driven and can also depend on citizen characteristics and type of information released (Di Mascio et al., 2019).
Governments may release large amounts of raw and unanalysed data thus indicating compliance with transparency requirements (Arapis & Reitano, 2018), while in fact leading to obfuscation and obscurity (Lundgren & Westlund, 2017). In other words, volume does not constitute quality or usability of data (Jamieson et al., 2019). Moreover, transparency does not guarantee the truthfulness of what is made transparent (Clinger, 2017).
Failure to Reach and Engage Target Audiences
The availability of information is usually understood as a precondition for effective citizen participation in decision-making processes. In reality, it appears to be challenging to bring information to target audiences or for citizens to use information effectively.
For the case of the United Kingdom, Worthy (2010, p. 572) reports that ‘very few people use FOI, so only a few people’s understanding of government can be directly affected. Requests are rarely for information that would disclose the reasoning behind a decision or process through which it goes: One official described freedom of information requests as being used in order to obtain facts rather than learn about processes’. Most FOI requests are, in fact, of private nature and have no political connotation (Michener & Worthy, 2018). This can be due to a lack of knowledge on the side of citizens regarding freedom of information rights or the inability to make use of published information. This effect might be amplified through e-transparency, as it excludes citizens with limited skills on how to use digital systems. ‘Citizens are now invited to assess organizational performance on the basis of gigabytes of raw data, without assistance from professional auditors’ (Ferry et al., 2015). Moreover, ‘information released by transparency initiatives is disproportionately consumed by higher-income citizens; that higher-income citizens are more likely to vote than the poor, and thus, to sanction legislators for perceived non-responsiveness’ (Severson, 2018). Thus, information is not equally distributed to the population.
In consequence, citizen empowerment is essential to render transparency laws effective (Radu, 2019). Government must thus work with information seekers to develop adequate transparency measures and data formats (Heimstädt & Dobusch, 2018).
Persistence of Bureaucratic Secrecy
The introduction of transparency provisions alone does not suffice to enhance publicity. Pasquier and Villeneuve (2007) identify the following barriers to transparency: disobedience of access laws; defective implementation of access laws; obstruction of transparency through the motivation of other laws and, finally, excessive or unsorted release of information. Prolongation of disclosure is another common phenomenon to circumvent transparency obligations (Gingras, 2012). These dynamics could be explained through circumvention and blame-avoidance (Hood, 2007) or simply a lack of resources and expertise within a public organization (Nam, 2014).
Beyond that, transparency provisions might provoke new forms of opacity (Flyverbom et al., 2015, p. 400) such as informalization of discussions (Broniecki, 2020) or window-dressing – polishing and twisting of information – thus creating ‘false transparency’.
Theory Failure
Failure to Enhance Legitimacy and Trust
It appears that the pre-disposition towards government has an influence on how information is received favourable or not (Grimmelikhuijsen & Meijer, 2012). Perception of transparency policies are not always congruent and differs depending on the stakeholder and how it benefits them or not (Bunea, 2018). Moreover, transparency can negatively affect government legitimacy when a policy area is subject to a high degree of controversy (Piotrowski, 2017). Thus, transparency might negatively influence confidence in government (Brusca et al., 2018).
Further, the transparency of policy-making processes might face different levels of legitimacy than the transparency of outcomes (de Fine Licht, 2014). This might be attributed to the fact that policy making is rarely rational or close to the deliberative ideal, thus leading to a demystification of how government actually works. Pereyra (2019) argued that that scandalization logic surrounding transparency is disconnected from public policy, but rather used as a weapon to investigate previous governments or delegitimize political opponents (Tonhaeuser & Stavenes, 2020).
Thus, transparency does not necessarily increase trust in and legitimacy of governments, but instead contributes to civic resignation. The exposure of government shortcoming or failures (e.g. corruption) can demotivate and disillusion citizens. ‘Increasing dissemination of documents – financial accounts, international codes and standards, audits – may in fact obfuscate rather than clarify, heighten suspicion rather than soothe it.’ (Roelofs, 2019). Especially when exposures are not met with adequate sanctioning mechanisms, citizens might prefer to withdraw from the political process altogether due to disillusionment. Equally, transparency can create perpetuate the informalization of discussions, removing them from the public gaze and thus undermined instead of strengthening the legitimacy of legislative processes (Brandsma, 2019).
Failure to Enhance Quality of Governance
Regarding the promise that transparency can enhance the quality of governance, studies indicate that transparency is not per se beneficial. Too much openness or openness in the ‘wrong’ fields might render negatively affect governance sub-optimal.
Some scholars discussing the impact of transparency on negotiation and deliberation, suggest that the visibility of policymaking is rendering processes procedural, and thus less efficient or effective. Officials might feel an increased risk aversion. Transparency can add turbulence and unpredictability to political process (Worthy, 2015) and might inflict upon policymakers’ room to think and deliberate openly.
Publicity leads to a manipulation of the debate, pandering and image maintenance (Cain, 2016; Chambers, 2004), leading to stalemate or more polarized debates (Cross, 2013). Transparency can exacerbate career concerns, incentivizing politicians to pander to the public or they may allow third parties to incentivize behaviour not in the public interest (Gradwohl & Feddersen, 2018).
Further, several authors suggest that disclosure might impede the performance of public organizations, rendering policy-making procedural and thus hampering efficiency and effectiveness. Worthy (2015) notes that FOI in the UK discouraged public sector innovators. Halachmi and Greiling (2013) observe that transparency renders staff rule-obsessed rather than relying on common-sense. ‘Transparency risks include heightened political scrutiny of administrative processes and decisions, unnecessary controversy due to the contentious nature of some agency decisions, significant delays in making administrative decisions, and undermined legitimacy and resource support in the event of questionable administrative decisions’ (Chen & Chang, 2020).
Failure to Support Accountability
Transparency promises to enhance governments and administrations’ accountability through mandating disclosure of processes, rationales or outcomes, but also by undermining shirking of public officials, who know that their actions are monitored. However, it appears that in reality, transparency alone does not support accountability; rather, follow-up mechanisms are needed to make transparency effective as an accountability tool.
Without a mechanism to hold the government accountable, transparency has little impact (Seligsohn et al., 2018). ‘Transparency and publicity will not induce any change in behaviour on the part of the agent unless it believes that the principal will go from awareness to action and actually impose the costs of accountability. To take that step the principal must have some instrument at hand for holding the agent accountable.’ (Lindstedt & Naurin, 2010, p. 305). Bauhr and Grimes (2014) take these concerns on step further arguing that transparency without the necessary sanctioning mechanisms might fact reverse the positive assumptions of transparency as regulation. ‘The principal-agent presupposes the existence of reliable means of sanctioning, and if principals (citizens) lack institutional avenues by which to utilize the information to hold agents (office holders) accountable, information may instead deter civic engagement, derailing the expected positive spiral’ (Bauhr & Grimes, 2014, p. 311).
Failure to Further Public Interest and Empowerment
While transparency measures are primarily intended to enhance knowledge amongst citizens, it appears that transparency primarily benefits power actors that have either means, resources and information level to partake in decision-making or vested interests in the outcome of a policy process. Cain (2016) notes that ‘interested parties, not the general public, monitor the public sessions of agencies in order to influence outcomes.’ (p. 296). A variety of articles in our dataset analyse the problem of ‘transparency capture’ pointing to the ability of openness provisions ‘further perpetuating inequality and failing to live up to its emancipatory promise’ (Mol, 2010) and creating new asymmetries of power and knowledge within societies (Bunea, 2018; Ciplet et al., 2018). Citizen’s failure to make effective use of transparency policies has been described as a collective action problem (Bauhr & Grimes, 2014; Kosack & Fung, 2014).
Reasons for Failure
While the previous section presented the dynamics of failure, the following outlines the main reasons underpinning them, using the categorization of Hudson et al. (2019).
Contextual Appropriateness
Contextual factors might influence the way in which transparency can prove to be effective. While transparency is considered of universal value, this notion also changes from context to context and can even vary depending on a person’s socio-demographic position (Clinger, 2017). Concretely, transparency might work differently across democratic systems, societies or cultures. Notably, one study investigating the cultural factors that can interfere with the effectiveness of transparency, found that a power distance and long-term orientation within a country’s culture might have negative effects on transparency (Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2013). Equally, political systems might have avenues other than freedom of information laws or open government platforms for the provisions of information (Holsen & Pasquier, 2010). A study by Grimmelikhuijsen and Kasymova (2015) points out that consensual systems might be less responsive to demands of transparency. The author concludes that transparency resonates very differently in various systems, which is why there might not be a one-size fits all solution for rendering transparency effective. Variances in compliance or cooperation might not only depend on context and culture but also political leadership (Atkinson et al., 2019). In a similar spirit, Ortiz-Rodriguez et al. (2018) note that administrative culture appears to play a fundamental role in the implementation of transparency measures, noting that compliance is significantly higher in Anglo-Saxon countries than continental Europe.
Dispersed Governance
Decentralized implementation of centrally adopted transparency policies can pose a challenge to policy success. ‘The major barriers to implementation – at the national and provincial levels as well as the local level – can be summarized as pertaining to a lack of awareness, a lack of resources and capacity, and a lack of political will or “buy-in” from senior management. Resources are a major barrier.’ (Berliner, 2017, p. 645). Compliance is costly, requiring not just scarce resources but also new political risks.
Overoptimistic Expectations
In their analysis of policy failures, Hudson et al. (2019) mention complexity (underestimation of the delivery challenges) and lack of evidence base (insufficient objective, accurate and timely information on costs, timescales, benefits and risks) amongst the key reasons for overoptimistic expectation vis-à-vis the benefits of a specific policy. These factors appear to contribute to the challenges facing transparency.
Transparency assumptions disregards noise, resistances and blockages that occur within any communication process (Fenster, 2015), ‘operating with flawed notions of senders, messages and receivers, the transparency ideal ignores major developments within the field of communication and upholds unrealistic expectations of insight into organizations, institutions and governments.’ (Christensen & Cheney, 2015, p. 75).
Prat (2006) underlines the monetary costs and administrative burdens associated with the provision of transparency (p. 94). Specifically, building online information systems required for e-transparency can be especially costly, yet rarely levelling up with their actual usage. Beyond monetary costs, authors mention administrative burdens, social costs or compliance costs (e.g. Berliner, 2017; Meijer et al., 2015; Rauh, 2016). These have to be evaluated with regard to the law usage of transparency systems by key target groups. It also raises questions of the cost-effectiveness of transparency as a form of regulation.
The mere fact that transparency is not in fact delivering on its promises might have negative consequences: ‘Reformers who trumpet transparency at nearly every turn, or who suggest that transparency can cure all that ails public policy, raise public expectations of a much too extreme openness. As meeting such high expectations is neither realistic nor wise, raising these expectations poses political risks.’ (Coglianese, 2009, p. 530).
Discussion
The findings from this study impact the understanding of transparency, its study in studied in academia, and the way in which practitioners implement transparency policies. While the analysis solely focuses on transparency failures, disregarding empirical evidence on positive outcomes of transparency reforms, we get a sense of the areas in which transparency proponents might overpromise the benefits of reform and more practically, which pitfalls might occur during the implementation of transparency policies.
The table of results below indicated that transparency failures occur in all dimensions. In the case of ‘transparency as epistemology’ the theory failure is most prevalent. This outcome is somewhat unsurprising given that this dimension of transparency is least concrete and might not be directly linked with specific policy tools. Instead, it appears that the assumptions about enhanced societal information levels rely on an all-too simplistic communication model disregarding potential disturbances in the presentation, dissemination and reception of information.
The criticism of ‘transparency as democracy’ includes a variety of problems that are clearly related to ineffective policy implementation (e.g. lack of awareness raising mechanisms, data literacy), but equally theory failures. Here, we see more clearly that transparency might not only fail to achieve its promises, but that it might even have a negative outcome on those dimensions it seeks to improve (participation, trust, legitimacy). In consequence, we might be facing not only an absence of positive return, despite the investments made, but a reversal of a number of trends.
Finally, ‘transparency as regulation’ indicates primarily challenges in terms of policy implementation. While transparency promised a more effective and cost-efficient way for regulation, circumvention behaviours or inconsistent implantation lessen its effects. What’s more, it becomes evident that transparency is not enough; a lack of sanctioning mechanisms might render transparency ineffective. Moreover, transparency does not serve as a magic formula curing the ills and deviances of governance, but needs to be promoted, monitored and its effective implementation scrutinized. Thus, transparency as regulation becomes subject itself to regulatory mechanisms.
In sum, the effectiveness of transparency policies might be enhanced through improved implementation, drawing specifically on empirical insights how and why transparency fails. Too little knowledge exists regarding the potential pitfalls of transparency policies, focusing on a limited set of policy types and favouring conceptual reflection on the transparency ideal over the assessment of concrete transparency policies in diverse contexts and over time.
Conclusion
Scholars are at times accused of serving too much as advocates of the various topics they study, lacking critical distance. This analysis has shown that scholars have not been shy in analysing the negatives of the transparency dynamics, and to underline the limitations of a concept that is seen as quasi-religious deference (Hood, 2006). This is a good sign of the seriousness and continued relevance of academic research in a field that is crowded with more normative and political actors. On a more general level, the analysis also demonstrates the need for a more pressing analysis of policy failures, even for policies that make consensus as to their overall interest and usefulness.
Practitioners will find in this study a valuable analytical grid of the difficulties to be negotiated in developing an effective transparency agenda. The enthusiasm of transparency proponents is an interesting aspect of the current drive for more open and transparent governments but being able to identify pitfalls and develop strategies to counter them are as much if not more important to the success, or at least non-failure of proposed policies.
On a broader level, the question emerges whether the potential failure of transparency policies matters. Not least, it has been argued that transparency as a key democratic feature is of intrinsic value, this being desirable even when causing challenges or controversies in implementation. It should however be considered that transparency failure might undermine the ideal itself. While transparency proves to be a strong rhetorical means for initiating and promoting changes in the public sector, it appears that an overly optimistic transparency message might raise expectations that cannot be fulfilled. The overstated promises of transparency might raise unrealistic expectations and weaken policymakers and administrators. Thus, the transparency ideal might get in the way of successful implementation itself. On the flipside, the enthusiasm of transparency reforms was instrumental in bringing about policy change in the first place. These might bring limited return, or occasional downsides, to complex democratic systems, yet send a strong signal for reform to transition or developing countries, where transparency might provide a powerful advancement of democratic governance overall.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
None.
Ethical Considerations
Not applicable.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.