Paper on data availability and transparency

Dear all,

I would like to share the paper entitled* "Evaluating the role of online
data availability: The case of economic and institutional transparency in
sixteen Latin American nations."*


The paper was  published in the International Political Science Review and
can be downloaded from the link below. While the paper focuses on LatAm
countries, the framework is very relevant for other political and
administrative institutions. Please see abstract below and I hope you find
it insightful.

"We adopt the principal-agent framework and the asymmetry of information
between the principal and the agent in order to approach two subjects of
much attention and expectations: i) the formal online release of
governmental data as a means of furnishing information, and ii) its
contribution to government economic and institutional transparency. We
identify important characteristics of transparency as instruments to lessen
the information asymmetry in relevant areas (or subjects) where corruption
and inefficiency are generally present in political institutions. We focus
on the central governments of sixteen Latin American nations. We determine
that, while there exists a moderate release of data relevant to areas where
corruption generally takes place, its contribution to providing meaningful
information to the citizenry is minimal. Our findings also show the
importance of policy that explicitly mandates that data corresponding to
specific areas where corruption and inefficiency take place be shared over
the Internet; adequate levels of national online technical sophistication
are not sufficient. We conclude that modern information technologies, as
tools to contributing to government transparency and lessen knowledge
divides in the evaluated areas, are not meeting expectations. Our framework
and findings seek to utilize political science theories to contribute to an
early understanding of the role of modern data-oriented technologies in
government transparency, and highlight the positive and negative effects
that these can have in the betterment of governance and the consolidation
of democracy."

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?compose=14baa92a0bfb4a0a

Best regards,

Martin